Introduction & Overview of Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves

Goodbye to All That Introduction

There were many fine, powerful memoirs published about the First World War, and Robert Graves' Good-Bye to All That is considered to be one of the most honest and insightful. The descriptions of battle are horrifying, and the descriptions of military bungling and pomposity are darkly amusing. Graves' factual tone makes the remarkable seem unremarkable and the ordinary seem well worth examining. The book was published in 1929, more than ten years after the war's end, at a time when, like many writers who had lived through the war, Graves was still suffering from the trauma of fighting and was angry about the whole concept of war. His suffering shows in the disjointed methods he used—combining excerpts from letters, poems by himself and others, army commands and ramblings— to create a sense of the disorder he had felt since his time in battle.

Graves revised Good-Bye to All That...
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