Death of a Hero Critical Essays

Although two-thirds of Death of a Hero is concerned with the life of George Winterbourne before World War I, the novel presents the prewar era as a prelude to the great catastrophe that followed. Richard Aldington leaves no doubt about the ultimate target of his satire, vociferously denouncing the hypocritical Victorian platitudes that held killing to be chivalrous and erotic love to be shameful: “It was the regime of Cant before the War which made the Cant during the War so damnably possible and easy.” Although Aldington blames the war on the older generation, he finds the younger generation, including the supposedly enlightened intelligentsia, almost equally guilty. Not only was the conduct of the war itself dishonest, he claims, but it was also the expression of a pervasive dishonesty in English society.

Death of a Hero is more than simply a war novel, for it treats the experience of the whole generation of men who fought in the war and makes an urgent appeal for a less repressive society. The events of the book are closely based on Aldington’s personal experiences both as a member of the avant-garde in prewar England and as a runner and officer during the war, yet the novel presents George Winterbourne’s experience as representative. His death is ambiguous: Although his final act is clearly suicidal, the implication is that he has been driven to it by the tragic fate of the young men of his time whom society had denied such basic necessities as love and truth.

George’s death takes place on the same day as that of Wilfred Owen (1893-1918), the preeminent poet of “the pity of war,” on November 4, 1918, just one week before the armistice. Owen’s poems, like Death of a Hero, gave expression to the camaraderie between fighting men and the great psychological abyss that the war experience opened between soldiers and civilians.

In his section headings Aldington suggests that his novel is constructed like a symphony, with four movements (a prologue and three parts) in progressively slower tempos: allegretto, vivace, andante cantabile, and adagio. In the prefatory letter to Halcott Glover, however, Aldington also describes it as a jazz novel, constructed on principles such as those he had used for his long poem A Fool i’ the Forest (1924). Although certain musical motifs are brilliantly used in the descriptions of bombardment in part 3, it is difficult to see how the musical analogy functions continuously to give the novel its form, and...