ABSTRACT
This chapter briefly mention the genesis of Parade's End. Parade's End the tetralogy comprising Some Do Not, No More Parades, A Man Could Stand Up and Last Post depicts the end of an era, the decay of a society and of its values, which the First World War both exposed and deepened. We shall then move on to Ford's choice of characterisation and to the organisation of the characters along a spectrum of various ideological stances. Many elements in the narration may hint at Ford's own predicaments in the 1910s; much has been said in particular to compare Sylvia to Violet Hunt and Valentine to Stella Bowen, Ford's companion as he was writing Parade's End. Christopher Tietjens may to some extent appear as a combined study of Dowell and Ashburnham, as a further exploration on the part of Ford of the potentialities already at work in the cast of The Good Soldier.
