War and its Aftermath — Why Was I Killed? and Men of Stones

Abstract

In The Aerodrome the allegory was like an aeroplane; for good and ill it lifted one to a view of the scene available nowhere else, and too rarefied to be indefinitely combined with other human needs. At the close of the book the long view was ostensibly abandoned in favour of a cautious and reluctant assent to current conditions. These provided at least a chance for meaning and purpose to develop, even while they simultaneously placed obstacles in the way, or nurtured aspirations whose full realisation might prove incompatible with the circumstances that gave birth to them. Roy could allow ‘meaning’ and ‘purpose’ to remain as unbreached abstractions, towards which certain routes have failed to lead; he lives now in a state of potential which grants him a temporarily safe patch of ground from which to survey the alternatives. But in Warner’s next fictional work, Why Was I Killed? (1943), a similar retrospective investigation of some of the avenues that have led to the present state is conducted by one whose own potential has been suddenly cut off. Roy’s form of negative capability — his openness and his leisure to wait — has now to meet some harder questions.