Good Bye To All That Analysis

There can be no war without death. For some that meant that they were wounded, and for others it meant truly dying. For Robert Graves, that death came in the form of the ideals of his childhood. In Good-Bye to All That, Graves puts to rest his respect for authority figures. He entombs the religious values instilled in him from his youth. Finally, he inhumes the values of the British schooling system. However, the death of those values gives life to others. To replace his respect for authority, he learns a newfound loyalty to his fellow soldiers in the trenches. The abandonment of religious values leads way to accepting new stoic values. He supplants the values of his school with his own sense of honesty. In Good-Bye to All That, Robert Graves buries the beliefs of his youth and replaces them with the values he learned fighting in the trenches. Graves sees the trench warfare of World War I as a true nightmare, which makes him not have any respect for the trivial rules and etiquettes that his superiors want him to follow. When he and

When a new officer “found two rats on his blankets tussling for the possession of a severed hand” (138), the company turned the event into a joke. Instead of worrying about how sickening the event is, they turn it into a joke; One who cannot make light of the horrific will start to break down psychologically. As a part of gaining a stoic approach towards life, Graves starts to become emotionally detached. “Those who are killed can’t complain” (115), he says in reference to splitting up the money of those who died. By looking at the war from a purely pragmatic point of view, Graves is able to ignore the terror of combat. He holds this matter-of-fact view even when he comes close to death, saying, “Wonderful chaps these medicos!” (235). Viewing his situation in a lighthearted, stoic manner allows Graves to cope with all the death surrounding