Parade's End is a tetralogy (four related novels) by Ford Madox Ford published between 1924 and 1928. It is set in England and on the Western Front in World War I, where Ford served as an officer in the Royal Welch Fusiliers, a life vividly depicted in the novels. The four novels were originally published under the titles: Some Do Not... (1924), No More Parades (1925), A Man Could Stand Up (1926), and Last Post (1928). A tetralogy is a compound work that is made up of four (numerical prefix tetra-) distinct works; it is sometimes also called a quadrilogy. ... Ford Madox Ford (December 17, 1873 - June 26, 1939) was an English novelist and publisher. ... 1924 (MCMXXIV) was a leap year starting on Tuesday (link will display the full calendar). ... Year 1928 (MCMXXVIII) was a leap year starting on Sunday (link will display full calendar). ... Motto (French) God and my right Anthem God Save the King (Queen) England() – on the European continent() – in the United Kingdom() Capital (and largest city) London (de facto) Official languages English (de facto) Government Constitutional monarchy  -  Queen Queen Elizabeth II  -  Prime Minister Tony Blair MP Unification  -  by Athelstan 967  Area... Western Front was a term used during the First and Second World Wars to describe the contested armed frontier between lands controlled by Germany to the East and the Allies to the West. ... “The Great War ” redirects here. ... The Royal Welch Fusiliers was a regiment of the British Army, part of the Prince of Wales Division. ... 1924 (MCMXXIV) was a leap year starting on Tuesday (link will display the full calendar). ... 1925 (MCMXXV) was a common year starting on Thursday (link will display the full calendar). ... 1926 (MCMXXVI) was a common year starting on Friday (link will display the full calendar). ... Year 1928 (MCMXXVIII) was a leap year starting on Sunday (link will display full calendar). ...

The novel chronicles the life its hero Christopher Tietjens, "the last Tory," a government-employed statistician from a wealthy land-owning family who is serving in the British Army during World War I. Tietjens may or may not be the father of the child of his wife, Sylvia, who seems intent on ruining him. Meanwhile, Tietjens affair with Valentine Wannop, a high-spirited suffragette, has not been consummated, despite what all their friends believe. Much of the novel is spent with Tietjens in French trenches as he ruminates on how to be a better soldier and untangle his strange social life.

Almost uniquely among war novels, Tietjens' consciousness takes primacy over the war-events it filters. Building on his use of the device of the unreliable narrator in The Good Soldier (1915), Ford shows you a character 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 it, part of Ford's genius is to place an unimaginable cataclysm within a social, moral and psychological complexity unachieved by Ernest Hemingway, Erich Maria Remarque, Arnold Zweig or Jules Romains. Only Marcel Proust's Search for Lost Time (1927) exceeds Ford's success in marrying historical events to psychological nuance. In literature and film, an unreliable narrator (a term coined by Wayne C. Booth in his 1961 book The Rhetoric of Fiction[1]) is a literary device in which the credibility of the narrator is seriously compromised. ... 1915 (MCMXV) was a common year starting on Friday (link will display the full calendar). ... Ernest Miller Hemingway (July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961) was an American novelist, short-story writer, and journalist. ... Erich Maria Remarque (June 22, 1898 – September 25, 1970) was the pseudonym of Erich Paul Remark, a German author. ... Arnold Zweig (November 10, 1887 - November 26, 1968) was a German writer and an active pacifist. ... Jules Romains, real name Louis-henri-jean Farigoule (August 26, 1885 - August 14, 1972) is a French author and the founder of unanimism. ... “Proust” redirects here. ... 1927 (MCMXXVII) was a common year starting on Saturday (link will display full calendar). ...

Graham Greene wrote ^[1] that Last Post "was an afterthought which he (Ford) had not intended to write and later regretted having written. Greene went on to state that "...the Last Post was more than a mistake--it was a disaster, a disater which has delayed a full critical appreciation of Parade's End." Henry Graham Greene, OM, CH (October 2, 1904 – April 3, 1991) was a great English playwright, novelist, short story writer, travel writer and critic whose works explore the ambivalent moral and political issues of the modern world. ...

References

1. ^ "The Bodley Head Ford Madox Ford", Volume 3 (1963), Introduction.