SOURCE: "Parade's End," in Ford Madox Ford, Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1977, pp. 94-123.

Stang is an American writer and editor specializing in the study and criticism of the works of Ford Madox Ford. In the following excerpt, she provides an overview of Parade's End, focusing particularly on the symbolism of the main characters and their interactions with one another.

Parade's End is, of course, a "war novel"—really an antiwar novel, Ford called it, for he intended to show "what war was like" without overstating its physical horrors. W. H. Auden called Parde's End a "four-volume study of Retribution and Expiation"; Graham Greene read it as a book about the power of a lie. These themes are present, but they are lesser themes. As Robie Macauley has pointed out, Ford's book is really "more about our own world than his"; Ford wrote prophetically about the world he saw...