Chapter 27 Summary and Analysis

Chapter 27 marks a considerable shift in the chronological pace and topical focus of the autobiography. For Chapters 27 through 32, the pace sweeps in far more time for every chapter, a single chapter often spanning years. Graves necessarily provides less detail about events, and those events described often involve him only tangentially, or as an observer. Thus, the remainder of the autobiography reads more like a collection of interesting anecdotes than the personal-history style of the war-era chapters.

In October of 1919, Oxford still had very low enrollment and Graves found the campus to be nearly deserted. Graves read a course in English Literature but found it tedious as he had difficulty with several professors because of his unsympathetic views on eighteenth-century poetry. Throughout his school studies, and continuing until at least 1928, Graves constantly suffered from an illusory life of being at war in...