Editing Parade's End (section)

== Literary notes ==
Notably among [[war novel]]s, Tietjens' consciousness takes primacy over the war-events it filters. Ford constructs a protagonist for whom the war is but one layer of his life, and not always even the most prominent even though he is in the middle of it. In a narrative beginning before the war and ending after the armistice, Ford's project is to situate an unimaginable cataclysm within a social, moral, and psychological complexity.

[[Robie Macauley]] wrote that "the Tietjens story...is less about the incident of a single war than about a whole era" and its destruction. "Ford took as the scheme for his allegory the life of one man, Christopher Tietjens, a member of an extinct species, which, as he says, 'died out sometime in the 18th century.' Representing in himself the order and stability of another age, he must experience the disruptive present."<ref>{{cite news|last=Macauley|first=Robie|title= Introduction | work=Parade's End| edition=  Borzoi|date=1950 |pages=vi, ix|publisher=Alfred A. Knopf}}</ref>

The work is also striking in its investigation of the relationship among gender dynamics, war, and societal upheaval. Scholar David Ayers notes that "''Parade's End'' is virtually alone of the male writing of the 1920s in affirming the ascendance of women and advocating a course of graceful withdrawal from dominance for men".<ref>{{cite book| last=Ayers|first=David|title=English Literature of the 1920s|page=19|via= Google Books| publisher= Edinburgh University Press| year= 1999| isbn=  978-0-7486-0985-7| url= https://books.google.com/books?id=NvlZAAAAMAAJ&q=virtually|author-link=David Ayers (writer)}}</ref>