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World War II
World War II
No novel can theoretically be too long, but if it is too short it ceases to be a novel. It may
or may not be accidental that the novels most highly regarded by the world are of
considerable length—Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov,
Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Dickens’ David Copperfield, Proust’s À la recherche du temps
perdu, and so on. On the other hand, since World War II, brevity has been regarded as a
virtue in works like the later novels of the Irish absurdist author Samuel Beckett and
the ficciones of the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges, and it is only an aesthetic based on
bulk that would diminish the achievement of Ronald Firbank’s short novels of the post-
World War I era or the Evelyn Waugh who wrote The Loved One (1948). It would seem
that there are two ways of presenting human character—one, the brief way, through a
significant episode in the life World War II, also called Second World War, conflict
that involved virtually every part of the world during the years 1939–45. The
principal belligerents were the Axis powers—Germany, Italy, and Japan—and the Allies
—France, Great Britain, the United States, the Soviet Union, and, to a lesser
extent, China. The war was in many respects a continuation, after an uneasy 20-
year hiatus, of the disputes left unsettled by World War I. The 40,000,000–50,000,000
deaths incurred in World War II make it the bloodiest conflict, as well as the largest war,
in history.