Unnamed Narrator 4

The unnamed narrator of "All the Dead Pilots" seems to be a captain like Spoomer, who greets him as an equal while the gunnery sergeant stands in recognition of his rank (518). However, he doesn't seem to enforce his rank; the gunnery sergeant who is the source of much of his information has no qualms about discussing the antics of officers Spoomer and Sartoris with him, for example. He is an inventor, a wartime military mail censor, and a casualty of war "trying to get used to a mechanical leg" (512). A curious, sympathetic, and imaginative man, he is capable of recognizing the irony and the triviality of the Spoomer-Sartoris rivalry as well as the sad wastes of Sartoris' and the surviving pilots' lives in war. We identify him as British because of how foreign Sartoris and America seem to be to him.