Abstract: The paper focuses on Robert Graves’s historical novel Sergeant Lamb’s America and the way Graves rewrites historical facts based on Lamb’s original writing — memoirs and journals. Rewriting is a common feature of Graves’s prose work. The very fact that Graves gives a fictionalized portrait of the British soldier in the American revolution and describes the events and people from the point of view of people loyal to the Crown points to the idea that there are more ways than one of telling a story. By analyzing the protagonist, Roger Lamb, through the intersecting vectors of lower-class military servitude and his status as a colonized Irish subject fighting to maintain a colonial empire, the paper illustrates how the text deconstructs the grand narratives of both British imperialism and American exceptionalism. By relying on Hutcheon’s definition of historiographic metafiction, the author proves that Graves’s text yields a counter-argument, but the focus on the subaltern subject gives way to postmodern features of the text.

Keywords: historiographic metafiction, ex-centric, subaltern, postmodern, eighteenth-century realism

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Robert Graves’s Sergeant Lamb’s America (1940), and its sequel Proceed, Sergeant Lamb (1941), are not merely historical reenactments but a successful demystification of the events Roger Lamb had been part of. The novels represent a ‘literary docudrama’ that allows Graves to explore the nature of war and authority from the viewpoint of a dedicated soldier who serves in a lost cause. Sergeant Lamb’s America, which is a topic of the discussion in this paper, occupies a complex space between conventional historical fiction and experimental narrative. While Graves is often celebrated for his meticulous historical reconstruction, particularly in I, Claudius, Sergeant Lamb’s America demonstrates some features of postmodernist sensibility. In the novel, Graves tells the story of the American revolution from the point of view of the ex-centric, a marginalized subject, in the service of the British Crown, Sergeant Roger Lamb. According to Linda Hutcheon, the point of view of the ex-centric subject that undermines the official records of history and narratives, the so called ‘grand narratives’ is typically postmodern feature. Further, the text Sergeant Lamb’s America is also tested against Hutcheon’s idea of ‘historiographic metafiction’ to prove if it belongs to postmodern genre.

1. Introduction: Towards Postmodernism

By trying to define the novel Sergeant Lamb’s America as belonging to postmodern genre, I would rely on Linda Hutcheon’s definition of historiographic metafiction as ‘fiction that is intensely, self-reflexively art, but is also grounded in historical, social, and political realities’.[1] Hutcheon argues that postmodernism doesn’t deny the existence of the past, but rather questions how we can ever know the past except through textual traces. In the novel, Graves is not accessing the American Revolution directly; he is constructing a novel out of pre-existing textual remains. He relies on the real Sergeant Roger Lamb’s journals published in Dublin in 1809 entitled An Original and Authentic Journal of Occurrences during the Late American War and the memoirs published two years later entitled Memoir of his Own Life: Lamb, Roger 1756-1830.

The category of historiographic metafiction refers to fiction that is intensely historical but also intensely self-reflexive. Postmodern genres do not just recreate the past. They use self-reflexivity (the text drawing attention to its own artificiality, language, and narrative construction) to expose history as a human construct rather than an absolute, objective truth. A postmodern novel must explicitly question how we know the past, pointing out that history is always mediated by textual archives, biases and language.

However, Graves writes Sergeant Lamb’s America through a specific narrative mode that directly contradicts Hutcheon’s criteria for postmodernism. He employs an eighteenth-century narrative voice (based on the real-life historical journals of Roger Lamb). The text aims to create an authentic illusion of the past, rather than shattering that illusion through postmodern irony or meta-texts. The novel doesn’t discuss the difficulty of writing, nor does it present multiple, conflicting versions of the same historical event. Postmodern fiction treats historical documents with skepticism. Graves, by contrast, uses the historical record to reconstruct a seamless, realistic, and authoritative account of a British soldier during the American Revolution.

As Sergeant Lamb’s America lacks self-reflexivity, it can’t be categorized under Hutcheon’s definition of the postmodern genre. Instead, the novel remains firmly grounded in the tradition of classical historical fiction seeking to realistically mirror the past rather than critique in the postmodern manner the narrative techniques used to build it. However, the novel exemplifies a trait of postmodern fiction with regard to Hutcheon’s notion of the ‘ex-centric’, which she defines as the subject who from

the decentered perspective, the ‘marginal’ and what I will be calling […] the ‘ex-centric’ (be it in class, race, gender, sexual orientation, or ethnicity) take[s] on new significance in the light of the implied recognition that our culture is not [the] homogenous monolith […] we might have assumed.[2]

In other words, Hutcheon defines the ex-centric as the subject existing on the margins of culture, class, gender, or nation — those figures who are silenced or written out of history by dominant institutional powers. Postmodernism, Hutcheon argues, is fundamentally obsessed with bringing these marginal voices to the foreground to challenge the ‘grand narratives’ or universal truths that organize the Western thought. It is precisely here that Graves’s novel transcends traditional historical realism.

Rather than presenting the American Revolution through the perspectives of the great men of history — such as George Washington, King George III, or Thomas Jefferson — Graves refracts the entire conflict through a low-ranking, non-commissioned officer. Lamb represents the periphery of the official institutions and authorities. He doesn’t sit in the halls of parliament or shape military strategies. On the contrary, he exists in the mud, fights for survival, troop morale, and tells the story of his battles. By prioritizing this subaltern perspective, Graves demythologizes the great narrative of war. Through Lamb’s eyes, the conflict loses its abstract, ideological trait, and is reduced to its raw, material components. The great rhetoric of empire and liberty is constantly weighed in against the micro-realities of starving soldiers, decaying uniforms, administrative incompetence. The ex-centric viewpoint exposes the fact that institutional history maintains its coherence by omitting experiences of those at the bottom of the socio-economic hierarchy.

By employing sergeant Lamb as the narrator of the story and the subversive potential of his ex-centric position during the American Revolution, Graves amplifies the class importance of the eighteenth-century British military infrastructure and critiques the imperialistic position of the British army and the American revolutionaries in relation to the marginalized groups. First, in the army of King George III, the officer rank was exclusive for aristocracy and wealthy men. The labor of warfare was performed by the working class and peasantry. Occupying the liminal rank of sergeant, Lamb is positioned to observe and record the profound gap separating the two worlds.

This becomes apparent during the campaign leading to the Battle of Saratoga. While the common soldiers are exposed to horrific physical privations, the aristocratic high command, led by General Burgoyne, maintains European courtly manners and remains inflexible in terms of commanding. Lamb records this dissonance with a biting, subaltern irony describing the condition of the army after the battle of Saratoga and the march to Boston:

Meanwhile we determined to make the best of our lot, which was, to be short, deplorable. We were put that evening, drenched to the skin, into the temporary barracks that had been erected for the shelter of the revolutionary troops during the siege of Boston. These had since been dismantled and allowed to fall into utter decay. In a number of cases thirty or forty persons, men, women, and children, were indiscriminately crowded together in one small, miserable open hut. Our provisions and fuel were on short allowance, our bedding was a scanty amount of straw, and we had no furniture of any sort but our own camp-kettles, and these General Burgoyne had with difficulty saved for us from the enemy, who wished to seize them as legitimate plunder.[3]

Though the army has to proceed despite the harsh conditions of living and fighting, the morale of the soldiers remains very high. At one point, Lamb is given the opportunity to leave the army with his wife Kate and his child, but he decided to pursue his military career proudly serving the Crown.

However, it is the position and the stand of the soldiers exhausted by the war and circumstances, with rotten and ragged uniforms, hungry and sometimes deeply in mud, who defend the Crown that Graves describes and explains great historical events as the American Revolution is. The devastating state of the British soldiers is particularly evident before and after the battle of Saratoga:

On October 6th our rations were diminished by one-third, because of a great shortage of provisions, but without exciting any murmur or complaint in the camp. We were already reduced to salt pork and flour, with a little spirits; not even the officers being able to procure tea, coffee, or fresh meat. Our regimental clothes were in a sad state, not having been renewed that year: they had become rotten from the great variety of weather in which we had worn them and ragged from the briar and rough country through which we had fought our way (p. 321).

It is exactly these soldiers and Lamb himself who create history and whose voice must be heard in order to r an authentic account of the event.

2. The Colonized Colonizer: Lamb’s Irish Heritage and Imperial Paradox

Roger Lamb is an Irishman. In the eighteenth-century, Ireland was under British rule. Lamb was born and raised in Dublin. After considering several vocations, he had started the job as a clerk in the counting-house where he stayed for two years. As he grew weary of his lot he decided to enlist. One day after visiting the public house opposite the barrack gate he got enlisted by recruiting sergeant Jenkins. And he found himself in the Ninth Regiment of Foot. When he escaped his American prison camp in the second sequel of his adventures, he was Sergeant Lamb of the Twenty-Third, or Royal Welsh Fusiliers. He joined the Army out of economic necessity and poverty rather than patriotism because in the eighteenth-century Ireland was economically exhausted by the Penal Laws. On his march to Waterford, Lamb records the following situation in Ireland:

The labourers were paid by their titular employer, an absentee rector, not in money but in small potato-plots of an acre apiece, for which they were charged six pounds a year; which they worked out at the rate of fivepence a day. They ate no bread, but only potatoes, even on feast-days. Some of them were also, as a charity, allowed the grazing of a cow. This serfdom was aggravated by their compulsion to pay tithes (though illegally) on potatoes, turf, and furze, for the support of a religion which oppressed and detested their own. At the time that we passed through, there was almost famine in the village: as was customary in the months of July and August when the old potatoes were exhausted and the new not yet come to maturity. The cottiers were obliged to fall back upon boiled cabbages and nettles with a little milk, so that many, as usual, were dead of the flux. But once every week when their tyrants, the tithe-protector and the tithe-farmer, and the other Protestant gentry were safely away at church together down the road — where a wretched out-at-heals curate officiated — they would bleed the cattle fattening, on the summer grass to make themselves a holiday meal of black pudding (pp. 19–20).

This depiction positions Lamb, the protagonist, as a vulnerable subaltern driven by economic necessity undermining romanticized imperial narratives. Dublin’s harsh economic landscape acts as the initial antagonist proving that poverty is just as lethal as wartime combat. Lamb’s choice to enlist is an illusion. Poverty functions as a force that makes him desperate to join the military service. Enlistment acts as a financial refuge transforming the soldier into property of the state in exchange for a relief from destitution.

Later in the novel, Lamb’s economic vulnerability shifts his perspective from an imperial instrument position to an empathetic soldier, profoundly shaping his interactions with the American revolutionaries. Because he views the conflict through the lens of material survival rather than nationalistic fervor, his encounters with the enemy bypass conventional wartime dichotomies. Lamb’s own history of poverty allows him to recognize the lack of shoes, blankets, and rations not as a sign of inferiority, but as a familiar state of deprivation in the Continental Army soldiers. He recognizes that both British enlisted men and the American soldiers are marginalized bodies put at risk by political elites who remain protected from the physical costs of war. Having fled a suffocating Dublin economy, he possesses an undercurrent of sympathy for a population rebelling against the same oppressive forces. Because Lamb understands that survival dictates human behaviour under pressure, his interaction with revolutionaries, and later his captors, as well civilians are marked by a mutual respect. He negotiates, barters, engages in dialogue with them based on immediate human needs rather than ideological or national differences.

However, with this protagonist, Graves constructs a postcolonial paradox. Lamb is a colonized subject employed by the imperial army to suppress another colony’s fight for independence. He is the victim of colonial oppression at home and the agent of the same oppression abroad. Throughout his campaigns in the American wilderness, Lamb’s Irish heritage functions as a subconscious lens through which he interprets the conflict. He observes and reflects on the cause of the American Revolution stressing the matter of taxation and representation by and in the British Parliament as well as the huge amount of money the Americans drew from their mother country to secure their defence against the French and the Spanish. He compares the issue to the ones done to his native country Ireland:

The English, for example, prohibited the colonists, as they prohibited the Irish, to manufacture various goods in competition with themselves, or to purchase directly form foreign nations certain articles of commerce: England was to remain the sole provider and carrier as she had been at first (p. 69).

By identifying the systemic equivalence between the oppression of Ireland and the invasion of America, Lamb’s ex-centric attitude strips the British Empire of its mission. The imperial project is unmasked as a cyclical mechanism of subjugation that sustains itself by conscripting the very populations it has previously colonized.

This phenomenon is very well illustrated by Roland Barthes in the book Mythologies when the image of a black French soldier in uniform who salutes the French flag is demythologized. For Barthes, the image signifies ‘French imperiality’. He sees, as he explains, that

France is a great Empire, that all her sons, without any colour discrimination, faithfully serve under her flag, and there is no better answer to the detractors of the alleged colonialism than the zeal of this Negro in serving his so-called oppressors.[4]

Barthes reads the black soldier-saluting as symbol of pure and simple imperiality and deciphers the black man’s salute as a sign of coloniality. He shatters the myth even more surely by the obviousness of its motivation. In that visual myth, the soldier’s uniform, the blackness of his face, the military salute, is no longer a symbol, it becomes the very presence of French imperiality. The black soldier, the man from the margines, is employed as an actor of conveying a deeper meaning to the image he represents.

2.1 The Diasporic Split: Lamb and Irish-American Revolutionaries

Lamb’s marginalized position and his compliance with the imperial institutions can be contrasted with the choice of the Irish-American revolutionaries he encounters on the battlefield. During the Revolutionary war, many revolutionaries were Irish immigrants who had fled the British rule. When Lamb faced these men on the battlefield or on the streets of Boston, the novel shows two different trajectories of the same colonized diaspora. While Lamb seeks security by assimilating into the rigid structure of the British army, The Irish-American revolutionaries employ their historical trauma to destroy that very structure.

The spirit of these weavers, who were all of Presbyterians, was the Dissidence of Dissent, and was more obnoxious to our Protestant ruling classes even than Popery. Many thousands of Presbyterians had previously emigrated to America, being driven from their homes at the beginning of the eighteenth century by the inquisitorial Test Act, though they had been among King William’s staunchest supporters at the Protestant revolution. These had become backwoodsmen of the Western Border, and were to be among the fiercest and most redoubtable foes with whom we had to contend in the American War (p. 41).

These revolutionaries coming from Ireland originally were the fiercest enemies of the Crown. The British soldiers were constantly attacked and insulted by Bostonian mobs on the street while on duty. The Americans simply rejected the legitimacy of their red coats:

A sentry standing guard at the entrance to the Custom House or the Magazine would be mobbed by impudent youths, one plucking at his side-arm, another trying to knock off his tall cap with a stick, a third daubing with dirt his white buckskin accoutrements. And these young limbs of mischief would encourage one another: ‘Don’t be skeered, lads. He dursen’t fire. He’s a bloody-back coward like the rest.’ This term of abuse, ‘bloody-back,’ alluded, like the others, to the scarlet cloth if the infantry uniform, but glanced also at our military custom of flogging delinquents, by which the Americans professed at this time to be greatly shocked. Our men showed a great and disciplined forbearance at Boston (pp. 85–86).

The revolutionaries and the mob act as an ideological mirror that exposes Lamb’s psychological fragmentation. Through their attitude and acts, Lamb’s pride in his royal service is dismantled, revealing him to be an institutional collaborator who bleeds to defend the privileges of the very aristocracy that impoverished his family. At the same time, freedom-loving Americans show that freedom can only be achieved by shattering the colonial institution. Lamb, an Irishman, serving as a soldier of English conquest, becomes a fragmented subject who utilizes Irish grievances to forge a new nation.

Graves weaves specific biographical historical encounters into highly symbolic devices that illustrate the deep structural controversies of the war. An important illustration occurs during the 1777 Saratoga campaign. Graves describes a heart-wrenching battlefield reunion when an Irish soldier in the British army Johnny Maguire suddenly recognizes his brother Cornelius Maguire serving in the Continental army. Lamb who observes their encounter notices the way they talk in ‘the accents of the city of Dublin’ (p. 336), after which, the two brothers recognize themselves exclaiming: ‘Och, Johnny, my darling brother,’ and ‘Och, Corny, my jewel’ (p. 336). Graves explains that ‘Cornelius had emigrated to America twenty years previously, at about the same time that Mad Johnny Maguire had entered the British Army. Each had been totally ignorant that he was engaged in hostile combat against the other’s life’ (p. 336).

Graves uses the micro-tragedy of the two brothers to strip away the grand, romantic illusions of the war, exposing the deeply personal tragedy underneath the geopolitical conflict. He elevates this historical anecdote into a profound literary metaphor. The cries of ‘Johnny, my darling brother’ and ‘Corny, my jewel’ represent the literal and figurative breaking of the Irish diaspora, demonstrating how war and conflicts tear families apart. The aftermath of this brotherly encounter inflicts a psychological toll on the family as observed and recorded by Lamb. The two brothers, who decided never again to part, faced a moral issue, whether Johnny should discharge himself from the British Army and settle down with Corny on his farm in Connecticut, or whether Corny should quit the American Army and the two go west into the new territory of Kentucky.

Graves transforms the physical boundary of the river and the midstream embrace into an allegorical landscape. The scene of the reunion between the two brothers occurs at Hudson’s River which is preceded by the two armies, separated by the river, camping on the banks. When the British began to greet and talk with the Americans on the opposite bank, Johnny Maguire, by recognizing his brother, plunged into the river and embraced his brother in the water. The Maguire brothers are of identical origin (Irish), yet they wear opposing uniforms. Graves uses them to show that the American Revolutionary War is not mere a clash between two separate nations, but a civil war. The division of the Maguire family mirrors the tragic, unnatural tearing apart of the English-speaking world and the British Empire itself. The river acts as a space where political ideologies and military allegiances wash away. When the brothers disregard their uniforms to plunge into the neutral territory of water, Graves highlights the artificiality of wartime divisions: ‘They found their feet on a shallow place near the middle, where they hung on each other’s necks and wept’ (p. 336), as Graves adapted and recorded Lamb’s observation. The midstream embrace becomes a literal and figurative highwater mark of raw humanity conquering state hostility. Written and published in 1940 at the onset of World War II, Graves infused the narrative with his own exhaustion regarding global conflict. The brothers represent the tragic absurdity of common, decent men being forced by geopolitical tides to aim rifles at their own metaphorical or literal brethren.

Graves does not paint either brother as a villain; instead, he uses the narrator, Sergeant Lamb, to examine the validity of both sides. The British Maguire represents the moral framework of sworn institutional duty, discipline and loyalty to the Crown. To desert or to abandon his post would violate his sacred soldierly oath and his personal honour. Lamb comments that

it was consoling that we had preserved the dignity of the British character and extorted from a successful foe, vastly outnumbering us and straining every nerve to tarnish our honour, so plain an admission of the awe in which they held our enfeebled arms (p. 336).

On the other hand, the American Maguire represents the moral framework of Enlightenment liberty, self-determination, and the promise of the New World. His loyalty is to a future vision of freedom and the land that took him in as an emigrant.

Graves elevates this historical coincidence into a profound metaphor for the breaking nature of the British Empire and uses it to denote a complex moral dispute about loyalty, duty, and human connection. The brothers’ realization that they were engaged in hostile combat against each other’s life forces an immediate moral crisis that shatters their allegiance to their respective causes. Their vow to never separate again is Graves’s ultimate commentary on the dispute: blood, love, and basic human fraternity possess a higher moral authority than the state. By choosing each other over their armies, the brothers reject the abstract demands of both King and Congress. Graves shapes this decision not as an act of political treason or cowardice, but as a righteous reassertion of natural law. The moral dispute is resolved by elevating the private, sacred bond of family above the public duty of war.

Lamb’s own Irish identity acts as the emotional and psychological lens through which he views the Maguire brothers. As an Irishman wearing a British uniform, Lamb lives the exact contradiction that tears the Maguires apart, making his narrative perspective deeply empathetic and conflicted. Graves uses Lamb’s specific cultural background to shape his observation of the event as well.

Lamb recognizes himself in both brothers. As an Irish soldier in the British 9th Regiment of Foot, Lamb has sworn an oath of allegiance to the British Crown. Yet, he is aware of the historical grievances of his homeland. Lamb represents the thousands of Irishmen who fought for the Empire despite England’s subjugation of Ireland. When he watches the Maguires, he sees his own internal duality. One brother represents Lamb’s current reality (sworn British duty), while the other represents a common Irish path (emigration to America in search for freedom and better life). Lamb’s narration of the brothers weeping in the river is not just detached observation. It is a reflection of his own deep sorrow regarding the tragic fragmented fate of the Irish diaspora, forced to fight each other on foreign soil for foreign empires.

By juxtaposing Lamb with his revolutionary countrymen, Graves underlines the tragic development of his protagonist. While the Irish-American revolutionaries use their marginalization to reinvent a new national future for themselves, Lamb remains trapped within the cogs of the old empire, fully aware of its injustice, yet psychologically incapable of imagining a world outside its structures. It is the author, Lamb himself, who reinvents his life into his memoirs, and later Graves who rewrites this unusual story of Sergeant Lamb’s life into a new text.

3. The Frontier Mirror: An Indigenous Alternative

Lamb’s ex-centric position expands when his journey moves beyond Western battlefields into the American and Canadian wilderness. In eighteenth-century colonial discourse, Native Americans were represented as one of the binaries and cast as either ‘noble savages’ or ‘barbarians’. As an Irish soldier, Lamb enters the indigenous space free from the entitled labels either of the British or American dominant discourse. Instead, he constructs detailed faithful descriptions of the landscape, tribal governance, customs, land resources. These descriptions juxtapose the dominant ideologies. By demonstrating that the wilderness is already governed by old human civilizations on the North American soil, Graves’s text invalidates the European colonial myth of terra nullius.

The climax of such a frontier exposure occurs when Lamb comes across a Mohawk Indian, Thayendanegea, whom he befriends and with whom he lives temporarily among a Mohawk tribal community after a wilderness escape. As Lamb learns to navigate the American wilderness using Indigenous knowledge, he implicitly learns that European military and cultural structures are not universally superior, but deficient. The wilderness ceases to be a passive backdrop for European conquest. It becomes a complex, pre-existing cultural landscape. By positioning an institutional British redcoat as a student of Native customs, Graves forces the reader to confront the ideological prejudices of early histories. Lamb, that is Graves, undercuts their human characteristic: ‘For Indians of rank deemed it highly becoming to accommodate their manners to those of a distinguished stranger, especially a host, and they were wonderfully observant; so that you would seldom find a well-born Indian behaving other than with ease and gentility in the most select company, if a hint were but supplied him, before his entry, of the forms expected’ (p. 216), or he observes that: ‘Their apathy is only assumed, and proceeds from no real want of feeling. No people on earth are more alive to the calls of friendship or more ready to sacrifice everything they possess to help an ally in distress’ (p. 219). Graves shows that the ‘civilized’ British and American forces are often the ones committing humanitarian absurdities, whereas the Indigenous peoples possess a human and rational relationship with people and land. Lamb even marries Kate Harlow in an Indian fashion and his child was born among the Native tribes.

Graves utilizes Lamb’s immersion into Indigenous society to completely transform him from a conventional European soldier into a figure shaped by native epistemology. Thus, he subverts Eurocentric colonial myths of ‘savagery’ by firsthand experiential knowledge of Lamb. Lamb’s knowledge and skills are put on test when he is chosen to accompany the prominent Mohawk chief, Thayendanegea, on an extended hunting expedition. As the eighteenth-century British soldier Lamb is trained in linear mechanical battlefield drills. By placing Lamb under the tutelage of Thayendanegea, Graves strips away his reliance on conventional imperial discipline. Lamb has to learn the intricate art of wilderness navigation, wildlife tracking, and winter survival on Indigenous terms.

Lamb’s experience with the tribes alters how he operates on the battlefield, making him a highly unorthodox British soldier. Lamb rejects the rigid outdated British rules — such as marching in tight formations with bright red uniforms — in favour of native irregular warfare. He masterfully integrates stealth, camouflage, decentralized skirmishing, and a deep utilization of local topography. This tactical shift that Graves describes serves as a brilliant literary metaphor for the larger idea of the novel. The British Empire is failing in America precisely because it refuses to adapt, blindly clinging to its own myths of infallible European superiority. By having Lamb survive because he embraces indigenous tactics, Graves uses a single soldier’s story to critique and expose the fatal stand of the entire imperial enterprise.

During his time living among the Iroquois Confederacy (the Six Nations), Lamb undergoes a deeper, systemic re-education regarding Indigenous governance and social life. In his original context as a British Redcoat, Lamb’s worldview is strictly hierarchical, built entirely around unyielding monarchical allegiance and military ranks. Through his observations of the Six Nations, Lamb experiences a complex society governed by democratic values, intricate clan laws, and profound oral traditions. This contrast rewrites the standard British imperial story of bringing order to a lawless wilderness. Lamb’s narrative voice acknowledges that Indigenous system of values and justice are often far more equitable and humane than the rigid British administrative machinery he left behind in Dublin and Montreal.

While living among the tribes, Lamb encounters Kate Harlow, a white woman who had fled her abusive husband Richard Harlow, Lamb’s comrade and friend, and fully integrated into the Ottawa tribe. Lamb and Kate eventually marry under tribal custom. They seemed to have gone native. In standard colonial narratives, a white person going native or marrying within indigenous spaces is usually treated as a tragic moral failure or a regression into barbarism. Graves intentionally rewrites this life event into a moment of emotional and spiritual salvation. The marriage challenges the colonial myth of European cultural and moral superiority. By choosing an Indian marriage in a native setting over a traditional Christian wedding, Lamb and Kate intentionally step outside the boundaries of the British Empire. Their union is legitimized not by the laws of their country but by the laws of the indigenous community that sheltered them, symbolizing a total break from conventional life.

His time spent in the Indigenous surroundings provides him with the objective distance to demystify both British and American projects. Both the British and the American cannot hide their desire for the indigenous land. Lamb witnesses how British soldiers exploit the indigenous people, how they bribe warriors with rum and muskets to fight against the American settlers. Consequently, Lamb notes the ultimate hypocrisy of the American colonists. The same revolutionaries who proclaimed freedom and equality were the most ruthless actors of the indigenous displacement. As Lamb belongs to neither the American planter class nor the British aristocracy, his marginality allows him to see through the ideologies of both sides. He recognizes that no matter to whom you turn, the indigenous peoples are the ultimate casualties of war, and that their view of nature and people could be an alternative value to live by.

4. Conclusion

In Sergeant Lamb’s America, Robert Graves constructs a text, a narrative structure, that is split against itself in a productive, illuminating ways. Applying Hutcheon’s parameters for historiographic metafiction yields a counter-argument: Graves’s faithfulness to the eighteenth-century technique of realism and his desire to correct rather than dissolve historical record alienate his text from postmodernism. Graves doesn’t share the postmodern scepticism that treats the past as a completely inaccessible fiction. Rather, he seems to rescue a forgotten biography of a marginalized soldier from the influence of the dominant interpretations.

By surrendering a narrative authority to an ex-centric subject, by filtering the events through the perspective of Roger Lamb, Graves proves that great, mythologized events and histories can be decentralized. Lamb’s stand is subversive because of his fragmented identity. As a low-ranking sergeant, his class position exposes the nature of the British military structure that treats the subaltern subject as expendable commodities. As a colonized Irish subject, Lamb’s ethnic heritage forces him to recognize the fact that the same military power he supports during the American Revolution is the one that oppresses him on his own native soil. This split is further emphasized in his encounters with Irish-American revolutionaries and Native American tribes. The revolutionaries expose the psychological paralysis he suffers while collaborating with his colonizers, while the indigenous people provide an alternative model of justice that unmasks both British imperialism and American democratic drive for freedom.

Finally, Sergeant Lamb’s America proves that the margins of history are infinitely more illustrative than the centre. Graves doesn’t need to resort to metafiction or self-reflexivity as a technique to deconstruct universal truths. He achieves this outcome simply by changing who is allowed to speak. The act of rewriting Roger Lamb’s life into a story reveals the truth that the most authentic accounts of human history are not found in the official records but in the mud preserved by those whom the great narratives tried to erase proving that ‘there are more ways than one of telling the story’ (p. 7), the sentence with which the novel begins.

Acknowledgement: A shorter version of this paper was delivered at the Seventeenth International Robert Graves Conference held in Palma, Mallorca, Spain, July 7–11, 2026. This research is supported partially by Serbian Ministry of Science, Technological Development, and Innovation.

Tanja Cvetković is full professor of English at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Niš, Serbia where she teaches English language. Her research interests and teaching specializations include English language, British literature, Canadian literature, American literature. She also translates poetry and prose from English into Serbian.

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