A Study Guide for Robert Graves's "Goodbye to All That"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Robert Graves's "Goodbye to All That," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Nonfiction Classics for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Nonfiction Classics for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Sep 20, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535824064

Book preview

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Good-Bye to All That

Robert Graves

1929

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 in 1957 at the request of an American publisher. While revision usually leads to improvement, many critics believe that the cuts he chose to make actually detracted from the book and made the book a less honest work, taking away some of the immediacy and confusion that made the original version ring so authentic. A major change in the 1957 edition, for example, is the removal of information about Laura Riding, a poet with whom Graves was deeply involved in 1929. Looking back almost thirty years later, their affair might have seemed unimportant to him, but the material that is in the earlier edition tells much about the author that should be taken into account when reading this autobiography.

Author Biography

Robert von Ranke Graves was one of the most prolific poets of the twentieth century, with an active career that spanned six decades. He was born in London, England, on July 24, 1895, and grew up in a well-established British family, with German ancestry on his mother's side and Irish on his father's. His mother's family, the von Rankes, was dominated by clergymen, while the Graveses of his father's side were generally intellectuals, right down to his father, who was an amateur poet and an inspector of schools. Graves was raised in an atmosphere of thoughtfulness and civility. He attended private preparatory schools until he was ready to go to Oxford, but his education was interrupted when he enlisted to fight in World War I soon after it began in 1914.

Graves' service in the war is told about in great detail in Good-Bye to All That, the memoir that he wrote when he was thirty-three, an age at which most people lack enough life experiences to fill a book. He was an officer in the war, serving in the trenches that were in