War and the writing of Henry Green

Henry Green belongs to a generation of English writers formed by the following experiences:;- born in the early years of the twentieth century;;- educated at private preparatory school, public school and Oxbridge;;- their formative years at school coinciding with the First World War;;- having been prepared by their schools to fight in a war which, once it had settled into a trench bound war of attrition, appeared to have no end;;- schoolboy consumers of stories of the heroism of war but also aware, after the battle of the Somme, of the horror of trench warfare;;- consigned, by the relatively sudden ending of the war, to be the generation just too young to have fought.;These experiences led Green's generation to develop a dichotomy of heroism and horror as their reaction to the First World War. Henry Green embodied the dichotomy into the form of his writing, producing a complexity and ambiguity of expression. This thesis argues that the dichotomy of heroism and horror as a reaction to war, learned by Green at school, present, in varying degrees, in the writings of the contemporary writers that form his generation, can be found in the form and subject matter of all his novels and his interim autobiography, Pack My Bag. The dichotomy remains constant, deriving its force of expression from the changing historical context in which Green's writings were published, similar to a musical motif, which remains constant as the underlying chords change.