threnody
is not only for the dead but also for the living. George Winterbourne’s
pre-war life and his war experience are his creator’s in almost every detail; but the unnamed
narrator and the survivors in the epilogue stand in for the post-war Aldington and his
generation. Reliving war experience while writing is a way of working through trauma, and
killing off the protagonist is a means for the author to free himself from his wartime self –
Manning and Remarque both do it – but Adrian Barlow (‘Answers to my Murdered Self’ in
Kelly, Lionel (ed.),
Papers from the Reading Symposium
(University of Reading, 1987), pp.
22-23) argues that the ‘split perspective’ of
Death of a Hero
reflects the notion, explored by
Aldington in
his poems
Eumenides
and
A Fool i’ the Forest
, of ‘the murdered self’, his belief
that his unique and creative personality (‘A self which had its passion for beauty / Some
moment’s touch with immortality’) did not survive the war.
Vivien Whelpton
September 2018
