Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh (Book Analysis): Detailed Summary, Analysis and Reading Guide

By Bright Summaries

Unlock the more straightforward side of Decline and Fall with this concise and insightful summary and analysis!

This engaging summary presents an analysis of Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh, which begins with a young man named Paul Pennyfeather being humiliated by his fellow students at Oxford University, and subsequently expelled. As a result, he is forced to take a teaching job in Wales, where he comes into contact with a whole host of colourful characters, including a bigamist who repeatedly fakes his own death, a bewigged schoolmaster who would rather be a preacher, and a butler to whom there is far more than meets the eye. Decline and Fall is the first novel published by Evelyn Waugh, who went on to write a number of other novels set in the interwar period, including Vile Bodies (1930) and Brideshead Revisited (1945).

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This in-depth and informative reading guide brings you:

• A complete plot summary
• Character studies
• Key themes and symbols
• Questions for further reflection

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• Language: English
• Publisher: BrightSummaries.com
• Release date: Oct 24, 2018
• ISBN: 9782808012744

Book preview

ENGLISH WRITER

Born in London in 1903.

Died in Somerset in 1966.

Notable works:

Vile Bodies (1930), novel

A Handful of Dust (1934), novel

Brideshead Revisited (1945), novel

Evelyn Waugh was an English novelist and journalist. He was educated at Lancing College, Sussex and later earned a third-class degree from Hertford College, Oxford. After working as a schoolmaster, briefly attending art school, taking carpentry lessons and attempting to drown himself only to be put off by a jellyfish, he published his first book, a biography of the artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti, in 1928, and his first novel, Decline and Fall, later that year. There followed a conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1930, a second marriage in 1937, the births of seven children, journeys in Africa and South America, stints in the Royal Marines, the Commandos and the Special Service Brigade during the Second World War and the publication of 13 more novels and several works of non-fiction, before his death on Easter Sunday in 1966. Waugh is revered as one of English literature’s finest prose stylists and fiercest satirists. His greatest novels are typically both hilarious and disturbing and chronicle the chaos, disillusionment and moral ambiguity of the years between