Birdsong Literary Elements

Fiction; War Fiction

Amiens, France, during World War One, and London, England, during the 1970s

The point of view is that of Stephen Wraysford, a young lieutenant in the British army fighting at the front in France.

The tone is somber and tragic, with a mood of "what if" or what might have been.

Stephen is the protagonist; Isabelle's husband is the antagonist.

The major conflict in the novel is World War One, which is described in brutal detail.

Stephen manages to lay explosives at the mouth of the tunnel in which he is trapped; he successfully blows it open, and escapes certain death, rescued as the war draws to a close.

Isabelle's pregnancy foreshadows her enforced return to her husband as her father does not want to endure the social shame of an unwed pregnant daughter.

No specific examples in the narrative; however, in the plotline, Stephen hides his journals, and also his entire wartime experiences, from his family, which understates their importance in shaping the rest of his life.

The book alludes to real-life battles and wartime experiences of those who were fighting in World War One.

The imagery of the battles of the Somme and at Ypres is particularly brutal, enabling the reader to not only visually picture conditions there, but also to imagine the sounds of terror, the smell of death, and the feeling of terror that the men must have endured.

Stephen's journals were written in code to avoid the enemy getting hold of any secrets that might be found within them, but it also prevented his own history to be hidden from future generations.

There is a parallel between Elizabeth's romantic life and that of her grandfather; both are in love with people who are already in unhappy marriages to someone else, and both have a child with that person.

The trench was the way in which the entire battalion was referred to rather than by listing individual soldiers by name.

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