ABSTRACT:
Pearl S. Buck always examines human relationships in the context of cultural encounter between two or more different peoples in her novels. Since politics is a major Social institution that shapes and moulds human behaviour, it has always been a significant component of her novels. Politics is not an exotic phenomenon or a convenient background for a story in her novels, it is her serious concern, Eugene Burdick's remark, in this context, is highly significant as it reveals her political awareness which is one of the basic elements that have shaped her novelistic vision. Burdick says : To the political extremist, she is subversive just because she has been so prescient on Asian affairs. Her sense of Asian politics and society results in such accurate predictions that it is,.by the logic of the extremist, a clear cut evidence of her advocacy of what has happened 1. Her Satan Never Sleeps, The Living Reed and Command the Morning illustrate this view clearly alongwith her autobiography My Several worlds.Command the Morning is a story of the Manhattan Project The novel covers a period of five years (194-45) during the creation, perfection and use of the atomic bomb. The scene shifts from the University of Chicago to Oak Ridge, and then to Los Alamos, until the explosion in the New Desert takes place and at the end the setting is extended to Japan after the atomic disaster in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As it has always been her practice to prepare herself with all the facts and figures of the historical event before writing a novel on the subject Pearl Buck has undertaken a great deal of research work for this novel also. In this context, Paul Doyle remarks: Pearl Buck. fascinared by the questions which atomic. science raised, traveled to Oak Ridge, Tennessee. to Los Alamos, New Mexico and to similar atomic centers in the United States in order to learn more about the development and discoveries of modem physics. was especially interested in interviewing scientists themselves and in obtaining their views on the bomb and on the problems stemming from nuclear science. As she has herself mentioned in a note at the beginning of the noyel, the sequence,of events in the creation of the bomb is ttue, but characters used to tell the story are fictional. In this novel America is always at the foreground and other countries like Britain France Germany Russia. Italy and especially Japan and India are at the background, and thus the setting of the novel becomes World-wide.On the surface level, the political conflict in the novel is between America and Japan; however, the main theme of the novel is revealed in the encounter between politics