The Star-Spangled Banner

The Star-Spangled Banner is a recurring patriotic sound in U.S.A., but its appearances do not settle into uncomplicated celebration. Heard amid Armistice crowds and printed in broken lyric fragments, it links national ceremony to the unruly conduct of returning soldiers and to the bodily costs that ceremony cannot contain. Its flag survives in the song’s refrain; the novel repeatedly asks what that survival means for the people who fought under it.

Performances in celebration

On Armistice night in St. Nazaire, the song plays in a red-plush cabaret while the room fills with drinkers and celebrants crying “Vive L’Amerique.” Joe Williams has gone looking for Jeanette, who is dancing with a Senegalese officer in French uniform. Seeing her with him, Joe attacks the officer; Jeanette is knocked down in the ensuing struggle, and a man strikes Joe with a bottle, leaving him unconscious. The anthem belongs to the festive soundscape around this violence, not to a scene of orderly national unity. Its presence makes the contrast sharp: American patriotic celebration shares the room with Joe’s racially charged assault and the disorder that follows.

The song also appears in a more explicitly civic setting. At the Custom House, a crowd sings under the direction of Byron R. Newton, the Collector of the Port. In the surrounding news fragments, the news sets off pandemonium along the waterfront, and the anthem becomes a public response organized around a national symbol. The difference from the cabaret is one of setting and direction, not necessarily of political meaning: in both scenes, the song gathers a crowd, while the surrounding details resist reducing that crowd to a single, harmonious voice.

Lyrics against the returned soldiers’ experience

The novel reproduces the anthem not as a complete performance but in separated lines: “Oh say can you see by the dawn’s early light,” followed by “What so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming” and the remembered “rocket’s red glare” and “bombs bursting in air.” The sequence culminates in the claim that these were “proof to our eyes that the flag was still there.” The lyric’s movement from bombardment to visible survival supplies a compact national story: danger is endured, and the flag remains.

That story is placed beside a less ceremonial welcome. Soldiers and sailors give color to a New York City celebration, but some returned fighters nearly riot as they try to break an electric sign welcoming heroes home. The anthem’s lyric fragments accompany this account rather than resolving its conflict. A public message of honor stands above a crowd whose conduct strains against it; the men welcomed as heroes are not presented as a single, obedient emblem of national gratitude.

Immediately after these lyric fragments, The Camera Eye turns from public words to the repetitive labor and discomfort of life aboard ship. Its sailors empty leftover food over the side after inspection, endure the November gale and spray, and face repeated meals, inspections, and lineups among seasick soldiers. The transition does not claim that the song is heard aboard the ship. Instead, the juxtaposition places its grand image of battle and flag against the routine, physical conditions of military life. Elsewhere, The Camera Eye renders war still more starkly through blood, damaged lungs, and bodies carried into an ambulance alive and taken out dead. Across these contrasts, patriotic language and bodily experience occupy the same book without becoming equivalent.

National symbols and the cost of war

The song’s flag-centered assurance also gains force from the novel’s treatment of service and what follows it. Wesley Everest returns from overseas with an army discharge, a sharpshooter’s record, and a medal, then goes back to logging. Later, a mob takes him from jail and lynches him at the Chehalis River bridge. The anthem is not identified as part of this episode; its relevance lies in the larger disjunction between military service and the violence a returning serviceman can face at home. The promise of national belonging cannot be inferred from the flag alone.

Near the end of the book, a different national ritual attempts to give war death a public meaning. Congress authorizes the return of an American Expeditionary Forces member whose identity has not been established, for burial at Arlington National Cemetery. The body is selected from the dead stored at Châlons-sur-Marne, and the ceremony proceeds through silence, prayer, official speech, and military honors. President Harding calls the tribute impersonal; medals from several countries are pinned where the dead man’s chest ought to have been, and Woodrow Wilson brings poppies. The text does not say that the anthem is sung at this burial. Read beside its earlier appearances, however, the ceremony sharpens the difference between a national symbol that promises recognition and a dead soldier whose identity remains unknown.

Function in the novel

U.S.A. places the anthem among competing forms of public language rather than treating it as a settled verdict on patriotism. At the cabaret it sounds through a celebration that turns violent; at the Custom House it is led as a civic song; in the lyric fragments, its image of a surviving flag is set against restless veterans and the working details of military life. The later memorial ceremony gives national honor its most formal expression, yet cannot restore a name to the body it honors.

This instability suits the novel’s collage form. Newsreel fragments interrupt individual lives with headlines, slogans, and popular lyrics, while The Camera Eye brings private sensation and bodily experience into the same larger historical field. The anthem’s words can therefore sound at once familiar and unsettled: not simply a declaration that the country has endured, but a measure against which the book shows the violence, exhaustion, and anonymity that patriotic ceremony may leave unresolved.