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Soldiers die whom the reader has come to know. Ball is wounded. In one later passage, the mythic Queen of the Wood visits the dead, bestowing on them garlands according to their worth. Part 7 is the most fragmented, most allusive, most lyrical part of the book. The work is preceded by the poet's 7-page
Preface and followed by his 33 pages of notes. It is accompanied (in some editions) by his frontispiece-drawing of a soldier standing in the waste land and his endpiece-drawing of a spear-pierced scapegoat.
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contends that "The effect of the poem, for all its horrors, is to rationalize and even to validate the war by implying that it somehow recovers many of the motifs and values of medieval chivalric romance". Dilworth, however, argues against
Fussell's interpretation, stating the important battles that
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At the centre of the book, Dai
Greatcoat says that "you", the reader, "ought to ask" questions (like the Grail-questor): "Why ... what's the meaning of this." It is a question about war but also about life in general. In his preface, Jones writes that he did not intend this to be a "War Book". Life
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to a position in the front line. As Ball stands sentry, narrative realism gives way to Irish and Welsh mythic associations. Part 4 concerns a typical day in the front line, from morning stand-to to evening stand-down, alternating between fatigue duty, horrendous violence, and boredom. This day is
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and work parties in reserve (behind the lines) where rumours abound, culminating in their long march south towards the Somme. In Part 6 they are moved into various positions, and Ball meets and talks with friends. In Part 7 they begin their assault and fight through the day and into the night.
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and the fall of Troy. Dilworth argues that Jones's allusions to romance literature expresses the horror of modern war and the poignancy of the deaths of infantrymen; and contends that Jones intended to reinterpret the traditional depiction of war by, for example, revealing
Shakespeare's
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circular in shape, with echoing allusions centring on the great, long boast of Dai
Greatcoat. He is the archetypal soldier who has fought in previous historical, legendary, and scriptural conflicts and who never dies. Part 5 is a montage of events in
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considered it "a masterpiece", "the greatest book about the First World War" that he had read, a work in which Jones did "for the
British and the Germans what Homer did for the Greeks and the Trojans" in a masterpiece comparable in quality to
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The allusions throughout are literary, historical, and scriptural/liturgical (where references to scripture are generally understood to carry the significance of their use in
Catholic liturgy). The literary allusions include
261:. Far from "romanticizing" war, allusions to romance give to battle frightening archetypal force and express the combatants' preverbal intensity of emotion. Allusions to scripture (especially the
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narrates the experiences of
English private John Ball in a mixed English-Welsh regiment, starting with embarkation from England and ending seven months later with the assault on
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253:). The principal cumulative effect of these allusions is symbolically to align the Battle of the Somme with the catastrophic (for the Welsh) defeats at
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writes that it is "probably the greatest work of
British Modernism written between the wars" and "the greatest work of literature in English on war".
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first published in
England in 1937. Although Jones had been known solely as an engraver and painter prior to its publication, the book won the
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has always involved war (and suffering and dying), so if war has no meaning neither does life. The answer to the question may lie in Malory's
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a destructured novel, not a poem. In his preface and the dedication, Jones refers to the text as a "writing".
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says it "towers above any other prose or verse memorial of that war (indeed, of any war)". The Jones scholar
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Jones alludes to - most of them Celtic defeats - are symbolically contained in the archetypal calamities of
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Rossi, Umberto. “Il funebre a parte della guerra. Esperienza, mito e strategie narrative in
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shell exploding nearby. In Part 3 they march at night along a road and then through flooded
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BBC documentary – "The Greatest Poem of World War One: David Jones's In Parenthesis"
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Representing War: Form and Ideology in First World War Narratives
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Johnston, John H. "David Jones, the Heroic Vision",
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In Part 1, Ball and his battalion assemble march to
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