52 pages • 1 hour read
Evelyn WaughBrideshead Revisited
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1945A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
PrologueChapter Summaries & Analyses
Prologue Summary
Content Warning: This section of the guide contains references to anti-gay attitudes typical of the period, alcohol misuse, religious intolerance, racism, and pregnancy loss.
During World War II, narrator Captain Charles Ryder looks out over a military camp on the morning of his departure. He muses that the land, destroyed by the army’s arrival, would have been destroyed even without the war—turned into a suburb. The camp is adjacent to an asylum, filled with “collaborationists,” or Nazi sympathizers. The soldiers begrudge them their comfortable lodgings and certainty in their political convictions. Morale has declined following the announcement that the company is to be dispatched to the Middle East. Charles feels weary from the constant stress and loss of wartime. He thinks of his disillusion with the army as a marriage that has lost its love.
As he prepares to depart, Charles is joined by Hooper, a platoon commander, which leads him to recall Hooper’s arrival in the company. Their commanding officer had determined Hooper’s hair was too long and demanded it be cut during dinner. Hooper, though embarrassed, took this in stride. Charles reflects on Hooper’s pragmatism, considering him a symbol of “Young England” and using the man as an “acid test” for the positions and actions of “Youth.” Hooper is late, citing a reluctance to inconvenience his servant; Charles has the same response to an unreasonable commanding officer. Both agree that it is easier to give in, as if you get on their “wrong side […] they take it out on you other ways” (17).
As the company march, Hooper and Charles wonder if they are being dispatched to combat or merely relocated to another camp, as happens several times a year. They board a train, where they spend several boring hours before being summoned by their commanding officer to his train car. He scolds them for the disorderly state of their camp. Charles’s company is assigned the laborious task of unloading the train at their destination, a seeming rebuff for annoying the officer. They arrive late at night and work until the early hours of the morning.
The next morning, Charles learns they have made camp at Brideshead, an English country house. The name instantly evokes memories of peace and the past. He looks around the idyllic landscape, which looks both changed and unchanged.
Prologue Analysis
The novel’s opening in the mid-1940s underscores Waugh’s comment, made in a 1959 preface to the novel, that Brideshead Revisited is “a souvenir of the Second War, rather than of the twenties or of the thirties, with which it ostensibly deals” (8). The Prologue’s tone is characterized by a commingling of praise and loss as Charles returns to Brideshead for the first time in years, albeit under deeply different circumstances. The notion of “revisiting” the past is thus layered in the text; not only does Charles physically return to Brideshead, but he also returns in memory. The frame narrative introduced in the Prologue grounds the novel’s exploration of Memory and Nostalgia, one of its central thematic concerns.
Inextricable from Charles’s nostalgia for the past is his ambivalence about “progress” and modernity, as seen in his reflections on the Second World War. Looking out over farmlands scarred by the presence of the army, he muses that this destruction was inevitable; if peace had prevailed, the farmland would have been absorbed into a nearby suburb. He links the pastoral to nostalgia, with progress as a natural and unassailable enemy to the version of the world that he loves. Charles’s identification with agrarianism as an indicator of “home” is tied up in his investment in The Decline of the Aristocracy, as his recollections of his time at Brideshead will later reveal. Yet the Prologue already reveals Charles to be separate from this world; his discussion with Hooper about the twin dangers of offending one’s servants and one’s commanding officer suggests he belongs to the middle class. Both Charles and Hooper are caught in a precarious middle space, defined by their social relations to others. In modernity—and especially in wartime—these relations are changeable.
World War II is framed in the Prologue as both an inevitable and a pointless emblem of the times. In anticipation of being shipped to the Middle East, the soldiers under Charles’s command seek sensory experiences that remind them of “peacetime,” such as the smell of fish and chips, seemingly ignorant that these are not inherently emblematic of peace, given that they are still perceptible during English wartime. The fear of these things being lost is a fear that a certain version of home is vanishing. The violence of wartime and the violence of peacetime progress thus have analogous effects.
Related Titles
By Evelyn Waugh
