SOURCE: "The Tietjens Tetralogy," in Ford Madox Ford, Longmans, Green & Co., 1956, pp. 28-35.

Young is an English author and editor whose works include book-length studies of D. H. Lawrence and Ford Madox Ford. In the following excerpt, he focuses attention on the characters of Parade's End and their function in what he considers to be Ford's melancholy treatment of society in transition.

To pass from [Ford's novel] The Good Soldier to [his] Parade's End is to emerge from a room heavy with discharged passion into a city street full of vivid personalities. Up they pop like freshly painted jack-in-the-boxes: 'Breakfast' Duchemin, so called from his habit of giving lavish morning parties, the rich, cultivated parson who breaks without warning into loathsome Latin obscenities…'09 Morgan, the Welsh private in the trenches whose wife has run off with a pugilist‧ The sly, snobbish Macmaster rising suavely in the civil...