In Memoriam

It’s 1914, and World War I is ceaselessly churning through thousands of young men on both sides of the fight. The violence of the front feels far away to Henry Gaunt, Sidney Ellwood and the rest of their classmates, safely ensconced in their idyllic boarding school in the English countryside. News of the heroic deaths of their friends only makes the war more exciting.

Gaunt, half German, is busy fighting his own private battle--an all-consuming infatuation with his best friend, the glamorous, charming Ellwood--without a clue that Ellwood is pining for him in return. When Gaunt's family asks him to enlist to forestall the anti-German sentiment they face, Gaunt does so immediately, relieved to escape his overwhelming feelings for Ellwood. To Gaunt's horror, Ellwood rushes to join him at the front, and the rest of their classmates soon follow. Now death surrounds them in all its grim reality, often inches away, and no one knows who will be next.

An epic tale of both the devastating tragedies of war and the forbidden romance that blooms in its grip, In Memoriam is a breathtaking debut.

These book club questions are from the publisher, Knopf Doubleday. A full book club kit can be found here.

Book club questions for In Memoriam by Alice Winn

Use these discussion questions to guide your next book club meeting.

The novel starts off with excerpts from The Preshutian, and newspapers and letters play an important role in the communication of life-or-death information (literal and figurative) throughout the war. What effect did these media have on your reading experience and ability to know the characters? In particular, how did reading the obituaries written on the field— by Ellwood and others—reinforce the intimacy with which the boys were being asked to confront the totality of life at such a young age?

Throughout the book, Ellwood in particular defers to poetry and other literary references (Tennyson, Shakespeare, etc.) to convey or admit to feelings that are too intense—or even illegal—to speak of explicitly. How does this tactic preserve the boys’ relationships at school and at war? When it breaks down—and Ellwood cannot find the poems he once knew—what might this reveal about how his feelings have changed in light of his experiences on the front?

Discuss how Gaunt and Ellwood change roles in their relationship over the course of the novel, as it pertains to communication, sex, and survival on the front, separately and together. At what point does one become more dominant or confident compared to the other? How does this affect each man’s sense of themselves?

Ellwood tells Gaunt the first time they have sex that “It doesn’t mean anything, Henry. Only that we want to forget things, once in a while” (page 108). What are they trying to forget in this moment, and how does the nature of their intimacy change over time?

Discuss the love triangle between Maud, Ellwood, and Gaunt. How does Maud’s presence highlight and reinforce the ABOUT THIS GUIDE The questions, discussion topics, and other material that follow are intended to enhance your group’s conversation of Alice Winn’s masterly debut novel, In Memoriam, which follows the forbidden romance of two classmates from their home in a British boys’ prep school into the trenches of World War I, where the way they make sense of the world through literature, love, and death is completely upended by the atrocities of war, even as they learn to embrace a future laced with unprecedented uncertainty, fear, and a promise of freedom and forgiveness. QUESTIONS & T O P I C S F O R DISCUSSION authenticity of the boys’ love? Does Ellwood and Gaunt’s future look anything like the heterosexual married life they hold as a standard of love—as Gaunt reflects, “If Ellwood were a girl, he might have held his hand, kissed his temple. He might have bought a ring and tied their lives together” (page 121)?

On the front, Gaunt and Ellwood are at risk as soldiers and as lovers. Which risk is greater, death or injury or being found out?

How do we learn about the psychological effects of war? Consider Hayes’s breakdown (Chapter Seventeen), to which Ellwood replies, “I think you’re so frightened of losing your mind that you’re driving yourself insane” (page 201); and later Ellwood’s interactions with Maud, Gaunt, and his family after his injury, including Gaunt’s reflection: “It felt like loving a brittle impostor, one who had stolen Ellwood and would not return him. And yet, Gaunt was powerless: he loved every part of Ellwood, changed or not. If there was a lonelier feeling, Gaunt could not imagine it” (page 343). Was society prepared to handle how the war was changing the soldiers’ psyches, as well as the psyches of those who stayed home?

What details about the physical effects of war—hunger, fatigue, injury, pain—stood out to you most? Was there a line between the men’s experience as men—i.e., humans—and as animals? How did this division manifest itself in how their “bodies were used to stop bullets” (page 338)?

Discuss the shifting politics between the Allies (England, France, etc.), Central Powers (Germany, etc.), and neutral countries, as revealed in Gaunt’s motive to enlist, his rescue from the battlefield, his experience in the POW camps, their attempt to escape into the Netherlands and reception by the farmer, and Maud’s attraction towards Berlin after the war when England rejects the “Surplus Women” (page 371). What does this suggest about the reality of the terms of war—how easily do ideologies shift, on a national and an individual level?

What’s the significance of the men’s attachment to Adam Bede in the POW camp? What does the world of that novel (published in 1859) offer the soldiers by way of distraction, comfort, or focus in such an intense space? QUESTIONS & T O P I C S F O R DISCUSSION

What could have gone differently—better or worse—in Devi’s escape plan? Where does he get the ingenuity and perseverance to attempt (and fail) to escape ten times? What do you think happens to him after the war?

How do Gaunt and Ellwood’s assumptions about each other’s fate after Gaunt’s fall in battle affect their will to live, as well as to kill and perpetuate the violence of the war? Who and what are they fighting for in the end, including when Ellwood returns to France?

How do the members of the Roseveare family allow for Gaunt and Ellwood’s survival, on and off the battlefield? What does the family’s experience demonstrate by way of an answer to the repeated question of who suffers most during war: parents, soldiers, or women?

Cyril Roseveare says of their time at Preshute that “It’s your peers. Your friends [who raise you]. You can’t imagine how much we loved it, even when it was awful” (page 275). What lessons do the boys teach each other in school about the connection between love and violence, and how does that translate into their relationships in war? As young soldiers, who do they learn most from about how to fight and love, live and die?

When do the boys—Gaunt, Ellwood, and their friends—become men? Are they men in the sense of how their fathers and grandfathers served in their families and societies? What indicators are there in the novel of a changing dynamic for not only gender roles, but the place and necessity for men’s emotions to be expressed?

Have you read any literature written during or after World War I (see suggested reading below)? If so, what about this novel aligned with those more contemporary accounts of the Great War, as well as how wars since (through the present day) are depicted in writing and other media? What’s changed (or not) about the effects of war on the human spirit? QUESTIONS & T O P I C S F O R DISCUSSION Waiting for Eden by Elliot Ackerman The Runaways by Fatima Bhutto Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain At Night All Blood Is Black by David Diop Maurice by E. M. Forster The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien Counter-Attack and Other Poems by Siegfried Sassoon “In Memoriam A. H. H. OBIIT MDCCCXXXIII: 106” by Alfred Lord Tennyson Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo Alf by Bruno Vogel A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

What was your impression of the image chosen for the jacket/cover of the novel—a dark scene from No Man’s Land? Which is a more powerful way of imagining this place for you—a literal image, as in a photograph, or the writing?

Revisit the author’s “Historical Note” at the end of the novel. Did you sense the authenticity of her descriptions of the battle scenes and other aspects of the war experience while reading? Did learning about the characters’ real-life inspirations change your impression of them?

What do you imagine happens to Gaunt and Ellwood after the novel ends? Does Ellwood’s recitation of the line from King Lear open a possibility for him to be able to love Gaunt again, which Gaunt fears is impossible? What does love—romantic or otherwise—mean in the postwar period?

What aspect of the In Memoriam writings stood out to you most by the end of the war—the stories of the men who died, or the act of memorializing done by the men who lived? Who is being memorialized more in those reflections? Consider the newspapers and Ellwood’s battle poetry and his rendition of Tennyson’s “In Memoriam” for Gaunt.

In Memoriam Book Club Questions PDF

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