Much of Waugh’s criticism of modern man lands squarely at the feet of educators.

A tiny bit of a man pretending he was the whole. I thought he was a sort of primitive savage, but he was something absolutely modern and up-to-date that only this ghastly age could produce. He was a tiny bit of one, unnaturally developed something in a bottle, an organ kept alive in a laboratory. You know Father Mowbray hit on the truth about Rex at once, that it took me a year of marriage to see. Waugh issues a scathing commentary on modern man through Julia’s reflection upon her marriage to Rex: Rex is a Canadian businessman who marries the desirable Julia Flyte, sister to Sebastian. Modern man is particularly typified in two characters: Hooper (in the Prologue and Epilogue) and Rex Mottram (Books I and II). Just as the Marchmains are worth saving, literally and metaphorically, they are juxtaposed with the seemingly unredeemable modern man. Ryder, with the eye of an artist, weaves an ache, reminding the reader that something worth remembering has been lost.īeneath the layers of beauty, memory, and sacrament lays another theme: the miseducation of modern man. The threads of their lives weave in and out of one another against the backdrop of the decay and desolation of inter-war England. Drawn into the inner world of the family, he finds that beneath the charming façade is a crumbling foundation – a family broken by addiction and fatherlessness, aristocrats in the dusk of the aristocracy. He is drawn in by the charismatic and popular Lord Sebastian Flyte, the younger son of the Marquess of Marchmain.

His salvation is inexorably intertwined with the redemption of the Catholic Marchmain family. Like Theseus, we follow the thread of his story until the final twitch – the unlikely salvation of our agnostic narrator. It is a name with a conjuror’s power, and he is jolted back into his memories, to the days in Arcadia. Waking in the new camp, he asks the second in command the name of the location.

He has lost his love for the army they are leaving a camp that does not hold a single happy memory. They are impotent – running drills and writing reports as their countrymen die on the battlefield. His company is amid the latest in a long line of reassignments across England. Evelyn Waugh’s literary masterpiece Brideshead Revisited opens upon a melancholic scene in the life of middle-aged Captain Charles Ryder.

Brideshead revisited book online