Goodbye to All That

In Goodbye to All That, Graves reprints a letter that first appeared in The Morning Post, which was supposedly written by a mother who takes utter pride in raising sons who will fight—and possibly die—for the war effort. The mother does not reveal her true identity; she signs the letter only as “The Little Mother.”

How does Graves use the figure of “The Little Mother” to make a point about disillusionment and the military’s absurdity?

Teaching Suggestion: Graves understands “The Little Mother” letter to be a piece of propaganda, one that receives wide praise from British society at large and serves as an indictment against so-called pacifists and a rallying cry for the war effort. For Graves, however, “The Little Mother” figure represents a kind of jingoistic patriotism, one that Graves develops a great distaste for when confronted by the realities of war from first-hand combat. Graves doesn’t reprint the letter in his memoir to endorse “The Little Mother”; instead, he uses it as an artifact that represents the “war madness” that he and other veterans face when returning home from war.

Differentiation Suggestion: For advanced learners, this prompt could be used to engage higher-level critical analysis skills by having students draw parallels between Graves’s motif of “The Little Mother” in Goodbye to All That to Norman Rockwell’s painting called “