Some Do Not...

This first novel in the Parade's End tetralogy, also known as the Tiejens Saga, is an excellent specimen of modernist literature, and uses the latter's aesthetics in both form and style, as well as in presenting the focal character, Christopher Tiejens, as a man standing outside society, and representing what the social structure ought to have been in the stead of a chaotic world of hypocrisy, corruption, and ambition. One of the key concepts of Modernism in the novel is its use of the city as something much more significant than a background to the story. Much like Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, the city is intertwined and woven into the consciousness of the characters. The story begins, in fact, in Hythe, a coastal town in the English countryside. Both the descriptions of rural life and the kind of events which take place in it are used as a means to compare their underlying associations with those of the city. While the countryside is, thus, symbolic of the traditional values of the past, the city represents modernity and progress. Progress in this case, however, is not of a positive kind, for it is associated with isolation, estrangement, and fragmentation. One illustration of this binary opposition between country life and city bustle, as respective representations of tradition and modernity, is the weekend of repose which the men from the city, including Tiejens and Macmaster, had spent playing Golf in the countryside. Being a haven of tradition, the apparition of modernity in the shape of the suffragettes was rejected with violent vehemence in this rural setting. In this manner, the countryside is depicted as a place where forces of the modern collide with traditional values. Another example of that can be found in the the accident between the Wannop’s horse cart and the General’s motorcar. This scene is quite symbolic of the opposing forces of tradition and modernity as antagonistic to one another, and incapable of coexistence.While staying in the country, the characters were, by no means, capable of harmonizing with their rural surroundings. Mentally speaking, they were still trapped in the chaotic whirl of the city as was the case of Macmaster who spent his time daydreaming about his social ambitions, and the set of people he would be able to associate with in the future. The concept of alienation and estrangement is developed by means of the disastrous union of Sylvia and Tiejens. The two were isolated from one another on account of their lack and almost absence of communication. This can be generalized and applied to the whole social strata. The lack of communication, at the time, had led people to echo empty words in their conversations, like Sylvia and Christopher, without attempting to listen or understand the standpoint of their interlocutors. This concept and phenomenon would, by and by, worsen on account of the second world War and become a key characteristic of the post-modern literature, and more specifically the theatre of the absurd.