Look deeper.............


here are nineteen stories in Tales of the South Pacific. The stories stand independently but revolve around the preparation for an operation by the American military to dislodge the Japanese from a nearby island. This operation, dubbed Alligator, occurs in the penultimate story, "The Landing at Kuralei". Many of the characters die in that battle – the last story is called "The Cemetery at Huga Point." The stories are thematically linked in pairs: the first and final stories are reflective, the second and eighteenth involve battle, the third and seventeenth involve preparation for battle, a pattern which continues numerically. The tenth story, at the center, however, is not paired with any other. This story, "Fo' Dolla' ", was one of only four of his many works that Michener later admitted to holding in high regard. It was the one that attracted Rodgers and Hammerstein's attention for its potential to be converted into a stage work.^[3]