Analysis per GradeSaver.com:
Analysis
Pierre’s participation in the battle of Borodino is one of the novel’s most famous scenes, and it is in some ways its centerpiece. Unlike many of the novel’s subplots, Tolstoy is ambiguous about whether Pierre’s short-lived military career is comic or tragic. There are certainly elements of both modes here. Pierre evokes Don Quixote as he wanders confusedly around the battlefield and keeps stumbling inadvertently into the most violent areas. However, the episode takes a decidedly tragic turn when Pierre sees men being killed and recognizes the true horror of war.
Pierre is the third of the main characters to be disillusioned by the realities of war. In early volumes, we saw Prince Andrei and Nikolai Rostov have similar epiphanies. However, war’s perverse attraction still plays an important role in the novel’s middle section. For all the carnage, there are also opportunities for gallantry, as when Nikolai rescues Princess Marya. Similarly, Pierre notices a kind of beauty in Borodino’s sensory overload. Indeed, it is Pierre’s lack of fear that ultimately endears him to the battlefield soldiers who are first annoyed with him.
These ambiguities are consistent with Tolstoy’s meditations about whether language and storytelling can really convey war accurately. Near the end of the section, he writes that victory at Borodino “was not the sort of victory that is determined by captured pieces of cloth on sticks, known as standards” (819). Here, he deconstructs traditional notions of patriotism and valor (represented by the standard) and suggests that the conventional terms used to describe war are inadequate.
Tolstoy pairs the battle’s extreme violence with a departure from the style he uses in the rest of the novel. Like many nineteenth-century novels, War and Peace proceeds at a stately pace and is mostly narrated in long, analytical sentences. Tolstoy forgoes this strategy in the Borodino chapters, reverting instead to staccato exclamations, set off in their own brief paragraphs. These unusual sentences tend to appear at the most graphic moments. In just one example, he writes: “The wounded man was shown his cut-off leg in a boot caked with blood!” This stylistic departure evokes the sheer panic of battle.
This section, which further illustrates the broad canvas of the novel and Tolstoy’s great ambition to comment on history itself through his historical tale, employs some of the most omniscient narration yet used in the novel. Not only does he spend a significant amount of time not only observing Napoleon but also getting into the fabled emperor’s mind, but he writes some sections as though he were a military historian. It is useful to keep remembering that this is best understood not as stylistic break, but rather another attempt to broaden the canvas, to attempt to capture in this novel more than a story or a history, but rather to illustrate the complex workings of the world and heavens altogether. Ironically, this expansively detailed battle serves as microcosm for the book, a fact Tolstoy emphasizes by focusing exclusively on it in this section and through his many authorial interjections.
By this section, War and Peace has now featured two close shaves with suicide. In addition to Natasha’s brush with arsenic poisoning, we now see Prince Andrei as he considers allowing himself to be shot. Both characters decide at the last minute that they want to live despite their current bad situations. The parallel situations suggest that Natasha and Andrei are kindred spirits, since they both respond to their botched engagement the same way. However, the two near-suicides also suggest that they will be able to move on, since neither has lost their fundamental appreciation for life. Another irony in this section is that Pierre is driven towards such destruction by his love and appreciation for life. In order to feel, he goes somewhere that will make him feel terribly. Perhaps this is not his conscious intention for going to the battlefield, but the impulse that draws him there is the same one that leads him to pursue beauty, and we are reminded again that understanding Pierre’s spirituality is in many ways the key to understanding the novel.
At least I am confirmed and not imagining things.