The Work of Sleep
The Work of Sleep
Insomnia and Discipline in Ford and Sassoon
This chapter explores the function of sleep habits and insomnia in Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End and Siegfried Sassoon's Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, arguing that insomnia is an embodiment of the individual's resistance to military discipline, loss of privacy, and the subjection of one's body to authoritative control. Insomnia, a liminal state between sleeping and waking, pits the body against the mind or mind against the body, and in doing so illustrates the failure of disciplinary mechanisms to completely regulate individual behaviours. Further, the phenomenology of insomnia is in many ways similar to the phenomenology of experience in the First World War, especially given the war's association with exhaustion and fatigue, nocturnal activity, a sense of endlessness, and idiosyncratic temporality, making it an apt device through which to express the anxieties associated with participation in the war.
Keywords: Siegfried Sassoon, Insomnia, Sleep, Liminal, Discipline, Privacy, Fatigue
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