A Late Encounter with the Enemy

General Sash is the protagonist of “A Late Encounter With the Enemy,” as the story revolves around his alienation from his own history. General Sash is a static character in that his personality and values do not change until the final moments of both the story and his life, when he finally forced into a confrontation with the past he has been avoiding.

The first thing we are told about General Sash is that he is “a hundred and four years old” (153). Despite his age and the veneration that comes to him for having fought in the Civil War, he has no interest in history. He has forgotten many of the events of his life. He has forgotten the events of the Civil War, and he has even forgotten his own son. Further, while he is called the General, he was more likely a private in the Civil War, not a general. Even his name—General Tennessee Flintrock Sash—is false, invented for him by the promotors of a Hollywood film about the war. The premiere of this film, at which he was trotted onto the stage as a representative of local history, is the “one event in the past that had any significance for him” (155).