Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War by Paul Fussell

How hard is Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War to read?

Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War scores 38 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 58 out of 100

Fussell writes as an English professor steeped in the WWI poets, and his prose is stocked with literary allusion and precise, often mordant diction — coinages like 'chickenshit' sit alongside quotations from Auden, Yeats, and Randall Jarrell. It sits above accessible narrative history like Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel but well short of Melville's specialized cetology, closer to the literate-but-readable register of 2666 (65).

Sentence structure: 55 out of 100

Sentences are frequently long and clause-stacked, built for irony and argument rather than narrative propulsion, but they resolve cleanly rather than sprawling into Jamesian hypotaxis. The prose demands more sustained attention than Gatsby's balanced rhythms (52) without approaching the unbroken density of Proustian subordination (78).

Abstraction: 62 out of 100

Fussell moves constantly between concrete anecdote — a censored letter, a specific atrocity, a soldier's slang term — and abstract argument about myth, euphemism, and collective self-deception. That oscillation places it above grounded narrative history and closer to the philosophical debate embedded in Brothers Karamazov (75), though Fussell always tethers his abstractions back to a documented case.

Information density: 70 out of 100

Each chapter marshals dozens of examples — letters, memoirs, magazine covers, official communiques, literary quotations — to build its case, demanding sustained synthesis comparable to Diamond's multi-disciplinary argument (82), though Fussell's essayistic chapters give the reader more room to breathe between examples than Diamond's tightly chained causal reasoning.

Narrative indirection: 20 out of 100

Fussell states his theses bluntly and repeats them for emphasis; there is little the reader must infer that isn't said outright within a page or two. It reads far closer to Diamond's direct exposition (12) than to any text organized around a withholding narrator.

Symbolic density: 12 out of 100

As a work of cultural argument rather than literary narrative, Wartime treats symbols — propaganda imagery, euphemistic language, sanitized photographs — as its subject matter rather than deploying them as its own technique. It scores near Diamond's near-zero (3), nudged slightly higher because individual chapters sometimes organize themselves around one recurring image.

Ironic distance: 60 out of 100

Irony is Fussell's central method: he quotes official rhetoric and wartime propaganda at face value only to demolish it a sentence later with the documented reality behind it. That sustained, corrosive gap between institutional language and lived experience puts it well above earnest explanatory nonfiction like Guns, Germs, and Steel (8) and closer to the sympathy-and-critique tension of The Great Gatsby (70).

Resolution withholding: 18 out of 100

Each chapter argues to a definite conclusion — chickenshit was corrosive, censorship distorted the record, the euphemisms were self-serving — with none of the ambiguity of a text resisting closure. It sits with Diamond's book (18) rather than any work organized around unresolved mystery.

Structural complexity: 32 out of 100

The book abandons chronology for a thematic structure — fear, sex, rumor, class, the bomb — forcing the reader to hold multiple timelines and theaters in mind at once rather than following a single narrative arc. That's more structurally demanding than Diamond's signposted, linear argument (17), though still far short of a formally fragmented text.

How Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War is regarded

Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War holds a literary regard score of 60 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

About the author

Paul Fussell