Plot
While most of the novel concentrates on Stephen's life in France before and during the war, the novel also focuses on the life of Stephen's granddaughter, Elizabeth, and her attempts to find out more about her grandfather's experiences in World War I. The story is split into seven sections which cover three different time periods.
Birdsong has an episodic structure which moves between three different periods of time before, during and after the war. This is similar in many ways to the structure Faulks would adopt in his later novel The Long White Winter.
Throughout the novel there are echoes of several war poets such as Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen (1918)
Read more about this topic: Birdsong (novel)
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
““The plot thickens,” he said, as I entered.”
—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930)
“Trade and the streets ensnare us,
Our bodies are weak and worn;
We plot and corrupt each other,
And we despoil the unborn.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Those blessed structures, plot and rhyme—
why are they no help to me now
I want to make
something imagined, not recalled?”
—Robert Lowell (1917–1977)