ABSTRACT
The World War I fatalities lists compiled by the British War Office record the names of somewhat over 41,000 officers and 660,000 British soldiers. This chapter provides a starting-point by offering a class-conscious reading of David Jones’ harrowing epic In Parenthesis, which forged a radically new form and language for the representation of the common soldier’s subjective experience of the trenches of World War I. The commitment to representing the world of regular, usually working-class soldiers—turning their squalid everyday rituals into a sacrament which has been repeated since the dawn of timeextends to Jones’ extreme colloquialism. A similar point can be made by about the poem’s classical presences, which sit alongside the presentation of John Ball and his companions as the Arthurian heroes of knightly legend. Dai’s uncommon aria on past military exploits anchors the action at a point in a transhistorical process which stretches back to the earliest conflicts recorded in European literature and even beyond.
