Graves: Detachment and the Psychological Effects of War

Though there's much to discuss regarding Graves's memoir, I'd like to focus on the tone in which Graves writes about death here.

I continually found myself most affected by the sections of writing that felt most detached--most matter-of-fact. As Graves described his experiences in the trenches and the deaths he witnessed there, he refused to explicitly articulate his feelings in those moments. Instead, he described those scenes as factually as possible, allowing us to view those violent scenes as everyday, common experiences. More importantly, that detached description allowed me to feel the impact of those images as Graves must have.

One of the many examples of this detached description is on page 158. Graves writes, "The first dead body I came upon was Samson's, hit in seventeen places. I found that he had forced his knuckles into his mouth to stop himself crying out and attracting any more men to their death...I was surprised at some of the attitudes in which the dead had stiffened--bandaging friends' wounds, crawling, cutting wire. The Argyll and Sutherland had seven hundred casualties, including fourteen officers killed out of the sixteen who went over; the Middlesex, five hundred and fifty casualties, including eleven officers killed."

Aside from the admission of surprise, Graves does not elaborate on his emotional responses to this startling number of deaths, allowing his readers to realize the harsh reality of these war conditions.

I was equally intrigued by how progressive his wife, Nancy, was, considering the time, and I was surprised to read of their efforts to support birth control.

In class, I'm hoping to gain an even deeper understanding of the memoir by learning more about the historical context surrounding the war. I'm also curious if Graves's memoir did much to expose aspects of the war that the public didn't know about, or if many people were, indeed, aware of what was really going o during the war.