Themes (AQA A-Level English Literature A): Revision Notes
Themes
Understanding the major themes in Strange Meeting by Susan Hill is essential for your A-Level study. These themes are all supported by the text and align with scholarly interpretations of the novel. Hill's work sits firmly within the tradition of WWI literature, exploring how war devastates individuals psychologically and emotionally.
Susan Hill's novel continues the literary tradition established by writers like Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, focusing on the psychological rather than physical impacts of warfare. Understanding this context helps position the novel within the broader canon of WWI literature.
Comradeship and emotional intimacy
The relationship between Hilliard and Barton forms the emotional heart of Strange Meeting. This central theme explores how male friendship becomes a crucial form of survival for soldiers experiencing extreme trauma.
The nature of their bond: The friendship between Hilliard and Barton develops quietly but sustains both men throughout their ordeal. Unlike dramatic or heroic portrayals of soldier friendships, Hill presents their connection as understated yet profoundly meaningful. Critic Jean Webb argues that Hill depicts friendship as 'the one form of emotional survival' available to traumatised soldiers who have been stripped of everything else.
Male emotional closeness under pressure: Hill continues a literary tradition established by Wilfred Owen and later developed by Pat Barker, showing how extreme wartime conditions create deep emotional bonds between men. The novel demonstrates that male emotional closeness can emerge under extreme pressure, challenging traditional masculine stereotypes about stoicism and emotional restraint.
How this theme develops:
- Hilliard begins the novel emotionally withdrawn, protecting himself from further pain
- Barton's warmth and genuine openness gradually break through Hilliard's defensive barriers
- Their relationship provides the novel's only moments of hope and human connection
- The friendship mirrors Owen's poem 'Strange Meeting', showing companionship forged through shared suffering
The psychological damage of war (trauma, shell shock, emotional numbing)
Rather than focusing on physical injuries or battlefield action, Susan Hill foregrounds the internal psychological wounds that war inflicts. This emphasis reflects modern understanding of combat trauma.
Hill's focus on psychological rather than physical injury was groundbreaking for its time. The novel demonstrates that the most devastating wounds of war are often invisible, creating lasting damage to soldiers' minds and emotions that cannot be easily healed or even acknowledged.
Shell shock and its symptoms: Hilliard displays behaviour that aligns with historical descriptions of shell shock documented by researchers like Showalter, Rivers, and Myers. His symptoms include:
- Recurring nightmares that disturb his sleep
- Sudden flashbacks to traumatic events
- Emotional paralysis where he feels unable to respond normally
- Difficulty speaking about his experiences
- A sense of being fundamentally changed by what he has witnessed
Barton's trauma: When Barton dies, the trauma this triggers in Hilliard goes far deeper than conventional grief. His response demonstrates how war trauma accumulates, with each loss adding to an unbearable psychological burden.
The impossibility of recovery: A key aspect of Hill's treatment is showing that soldiers cannot simply 'return to normal' emotionally after experiencing such trauma. The psychological rupture is permanent, a point emphasised by modern WWI scholars like Fussell and Das who argue that the war created lasting psychic damage.
Critical context: This theme aligns with scholarly work on WWI that emphasises the 'rupture' war creates in individual psychology, fundamentally changing how survivors experience the world.
Innocence vs experience
Hill structures the entire narrative around the striking contrast between Barton's innocent idealism and Hilliard's war-weariness. This opposition drives the novel's emotional development.
Barton's innocence:
- Represents the 'newness' of young volunteers who enlisted in 1914 with enthusiasm
- His idealistic views reflect early war propaganda about glory and honour
- He approaches the war with energy and optimism that Hilliard has long since lost
- His character embodies hope and the possibility of maintaining humanity in wartime
Hilliard's experience:
- Has already lost his youth, empathy, and emotional ease before the novel opens
- War has made him inwardly broken and unable to trust or connect
- Represents the reality of prolonged combat exposure
- Embodies what Barton will inevitably become if he survives
War's corrupting influence: The novel shows how war systematically corrupts youth, extinguishing hope and trust. This theme connects Strange Meeting to earlier WWI works like All Quiet on the Western Front and Owen's poetry, which similarly explore how combat destroys youthful innocence.
The failure of language (inexpressibility of trauma)
One of Hill's most significant themes is demonstrating how soldiers cannot articulate what they feel. Trauma creates a communication breakdown that leaves soldiers isolated.
The failure of language is not just a stylistic choice—it reflects the fundamental nature of trauma itself. When experiences exceed the capacity of language to describe them, survivors are left isolated with incommunicable suffering that others cannot understand or even imagine.
Hilliard's struggle: Hilliard repeatedly struggles to express himself, avoiding emotional communication because words feel inadequate to convey his experiences. He literally cannot find language for what he has witnessed and endured.
The unsaid: When Barton converses with Hilliard, he often senses 'something unsaid' hovering between them—traumatic knowledge that resists verbal expression.
The civilian gap: Letters home reveal painful gaps between soldiers' actual experiences and what civilians can possibly understand. This communication failure widens the divide between those who have experienced combat and those who have not.
Critical framework: Santanu Das argues that WWI trauma often produces 'silence, fragmentation, and emotional inarticulacy' in survivors. Hill's novel exemplifies this theoretical understanding, showing how trauma literally takes away the power of speech.
Home front vs front line: the irreparable divide
Hill shows how war creates a permanent split between two incompatible worlds—the safety and innocence of home versus the chaos and violence of the front line.
The two worlds:
- Home: Associated with safety, innocence, predictable routines, and normal social relationships
- Front: Characterised by chaos, fear, disorientation, and violence that defies civilian comprehension
Hilliard's brief return: When Hilliard briefly returns home, the experience emphasises several painful realisations:
- Complete alienation from his family, who cannot understand him
- His inability to reconnect with his former life
- Civilian incomprehension of what soldiers experience
- The sense that 'home' no longer exists as a refuge for him
Permanent estrangement: The novel suggests this divide is irreparable. Once someone has experienced the front line, they can never truly return home in a psychological sense. Their fundamental identity has changed in ways that make civilian life feel foreign.
Historical authenticity: This theme echoes experiences described in real WWI memoirs by writers like Graves and Sassoon, who documented their own struggles to reconnect with home life during the war.
Mortality, fragility, and the futility of war
Death pervades the novel, but Hill presents it as constant, arbitrary, and completely lacking in grandeur or meaning.
Barton's death: The way Barton dies exemplifies Hill's anti-heroic stance. His death is:
- Random rather than heroic
- Unheroic and senseless
- Devastating in its emotional impact on Hilliard
- Presented without sensational description
How Hill presents death: Rather than creating dramatic or sensationalised death scenes, Hill describes death as:
- Quiet and sudden
- Emotionally shattering rather than physically explicit
- Stripped of all romantic or patriotic meaning
The futility of sacrifice: This restrained approach aligns with later war writers like Remarque and Martha Gellhorn, who present war as meaningless waste rather than noble sacrifice. Hill rejects any suggestion that these deaths serve a higher purpose.
The destruction of youth ("the lost generation")
Both Hilliard and Barton are young men who should be beginning adult life—falling in love, establishing careers, building families and futures. Instead, war ruins or ends these possibilities entirely.
Stolen futures: The novel demonstrates how the war ruins potential futures. These young men are robbed of:
- Romantic love and family life
- Meaningful work and purpose
- Peace and stability
- The chance to fully develop as individuals
Barton's symbolic role: Barton represents the future that will never happen. His death confirms the theme's tragic inevitability—the potential for life and growth is destroyed before it can be realised.
Hilliard's desolation: While Hilliard survives physically, he becomes a figure of emotional desolation rather than growth. He cannot move forward into a meaningful future because the war has damaged him beyond repair.
The "Lost Generation": This theme connects directly to the historical concept of the "Lost Generation"—the generation of young European men killed or permanently damaged by WWI. Hill's novel explores this loss not through statistics but through intimate psychological portraits of two individuals.
Isolation and emotional withdrawal
Hilliard embodies the soldier who collapses emotionally inward rather than reaching outward for connection. His isolation is both a symptom of trauma and a coping mechanism.
Hilliard's detachment: At the novel's opening, Hilliard maintains emotional distance from everyone around him. This detachment functions as a coping strategy rather than a personality trait—it protects him from experiencing further devastating losses.
Barton breaks through: Initially, Barton manages to break through this isolation, creating a genuine connection that offers hope. However, this breakthrough makes Barton's eventual death even more psychologically damaging.
Total isolation: After Barton dies, Hilliard's isolation becomes complete and absolute. He has nothing left emotionally and withdraws entirely into himself.
Psychological authenticity: This pattern reflects psychological responses described in early shell shock research by Myers and Rivers, as well as later trauma theory. Emotional withdrawal is a documented response to overwhelming traumatic experience.
Memory, guilt, and survivorship
Memory—particularly intrusive, unwanted memory—functions as a recurring motif throughout the novel, demonstrating how the past refuses to stay buried.
Haunting memories: Hilliard is constantly haunted by:
- His past platoon and the men who died under his command
- Dead comrades whose faces and voices return unbidden
- His former self, the person he was before war changed him
Survivor guilt: The novel implies profound survivor guilt in Hilliard's relationship with Barton. After Barton dies, this guilt intensifies—why should Hilliard survive when Barton, who was better and more deserving, did not?
Memory as burden: Unlike nostalgic or comforting memories, these recollections become a burden that Hilliard cannot escape. Memory offers no solace, only pain and a constant reminder of loss.
Trauma studies perspective: This theme aligns with trauma studies research by scholars like Caruth and Showalter, who emphasise that traumatic memory is both unavoidable and disintegrating. Survivors cannot control when or how these memories return, making them a continuous source of suffering.
Remember!
Key Points to Remember:
- Comradeship is central: The friendship between Hilliard and Barton provides the emotional core of the novel, showing how male bonds become crucial survival mechanisms in war
- Psychological wounds dominate: Hill focuses on internal trauma—shell shock, emotional numbing, and psychological rupture—rather than physical injury
- Language fails: Soldiers cannot articulate their trauma, creating an unbridgeable gap between their experiences and civilian understanding
- War destroys youth: Both protagonists represent the "Lost Generation," their potential futures ruined by combat
- The divide is permanent: Once exposed to the front line, soldiers can never truly return home psychologically—the split between home and front is irreparable
Exam tip: When writing about themes, always support your points with specific textual evidence. Connect Hill's themes to the broader tradition of WWI literature, particularly Owen's poetry, and reference critical perspectives to strengthen your analysis.