Literary Notes
Notably among war novels, Tietjens' consciousness takes primacy over the war-events it filters. Ford constructs a protagonist for whom the war is but one layer of his life, and not always even the most prominent though he is in the middle of it. In a narrative beginning before the war and ending after the armistice, Ford's project is to situate an unimaginable cataclysm within a social, moral and psychological complexity.
Read more about this topic: Parade's End
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