Author Shadi Bartsch discusses the importance of Lucan's major themes in this excerpt.

The previous two chapters have presented the grounds for a grippingly negative interpretation of the Civil War. This reading has had a powerful pull for recent readers of the epic; indeed, the present critical climate has rendered it one of the most compelling positions on the poem. The collapse of the autonomous individual amid the wreck of linguistic systems and subject-object relations, the hopelessness of meaningful narrative in a meaningless world, the impossibility of representing the trauma of Romans killing Romans—"Shun this part of the war, O mind, and leave it in darkness, and let no time learn of such evils from my poetry, that so great is the license granted to civil war"—all these are undeniable aspects of Lucan's epic world, and for readers of our times I think they are...