To argue or to judge?: The moral objectivity of Doctorow's The March

Some of the scenes in E.L. Doctorow's The March are so hauntingly beautiful - the novel at times reminds me of Winter's Tale (Halperin), and for that matter it recalls the style of ELD's own World's Fair, one evocative scene after another, like a dream sequence - only in this case it's not a dream but what appears to be a truthful attempt to have us not only understand but also feel what it was like to travel with the Union Civil War Army on the move during Sherman's march through the South, leading up to the end of the Civil War. I'm thinking of the scene where Pearl walks through the encampment of freed slaves, some 25k of them, who'd been following Sherman as their deliverer to freedom and safety, also the many battle scenes and the scenes of the pillaging of Southern cities, Columbia especially. This is the kind of novel about which some would say: This would make a great movie. But they'd be completely wrong, it would make a lousy movie, because a film would feel like a shapeless mash of images whereas this story - not really plot driven or even character driven, as there are too many for us to care deeply about any one character of set of characters - different from its prototype War and Peace in that regard - but more like a saga or incantation, a work that can exist in my view in literary form only. I would not say it's a great book but it has many great qualities - the topical and action descriptions about all, but also that there are surprising and unexpected plot twists - ELD does not succumb to sentimentality or narrative convention and is willing to suddenly kill of seemingly key characters, this is a war novel after all - and ELD deserves credit for avoiding the tendentious and the hortatory. I've been annoyed that the overall climate of the novel is one of hatred for the brutality of the Union troops w/out significant recognition of why they are fighting and of the evils of slavery. But ELD is striving to keep an even hand, or, more accurately, to be an objective and unobtrusive narrator - there are glimpses of the horrors of slavery, and maybe we don't need more than that - just to remind us, no matter what we might feel for the people whose cities were destroyed, that their cities and their prosperity was supported, in fact created, by slave labor. It's a novel that makes no obvious points or judgments - leaving that to us, witnesses to, participants in history.