Talk:The Valley of Bones

Goals for this article

• Plot summary
• New significant characters
• Sightings of old significant characters and what they're up to
• Themes
• Settings
• Critical reception

Novellasyes (talk) 20:47, 21 May 2020 (UTC)

I've added a section on cultural references. The other sections I'm working on [User:Novellasyes/sandbox/Valley|are in this sandbox]]. Novellasyes (talk) 21:15, 23 June 2020 (UTC)

Themes

• "The war seems to have altered some people out of recognition and made others more than ever like themselves." (Isobel Jenkins)
• The Alfred de Vigny perspective on military life
• How "men of imagination" fare in the military versus "men of will" with Rowland Gwatkin's narrative arc telling this story
• Capriciousness of change
• "War, not death, becomes the great leveler--linking, fusing, cross-pollinating."
• The pressures of war force action.
• Is character fate or vice versa? Nick: "Some die in an apparently suitable manner, others like Robert on the field of battle with a certain incongruity. Yet Fate had ordained this end for him. Or had Robert decided for himself? Had he set aside the chance of a commission to fulfil a destiny that required him to fall in France?...The potential biographies of those who die young possess the mystic dignity of a headless statue, the poetry of enigmatic passages in an unfinished or mutilated manuscript, unburdened with contrived or banal ending." [Robert K. Morris: when Widmerpool surfaces, "Life's incongruities have placed Nick in a situation that the sequence has been approaching from the beginning. Having traced and analyzed the force called Widmerpool, he now falls under it. To keep his comic perspective after that requires schooling to a new art."]

Novellasyes (talk) 16:44, 14 June 2020 (UTC)

Centrality of Gwatkin

• Said to be central by both Robert Morris and James Tucker. Novellasyes (talk) 17:22, 14 June 2020 (UTC)