Parade's End is not a typical war narrative, its unconventionality apparent at the level of both form and content. Not only was it published earlier than the 1929–30 boom in Great War narratives (Some Do Not … was first published in 1924), but the tetralogy also differs from this canon of war literature in its unique Fordian Impressionism that is explicitly preoccupied with consciousness and subjectivity at the expense of the action, drama, and disillusionment of the battlefield. For example, Ford recounts the daily experience of the war as follows:

The Fordian mind at war focuses not on present danger but on things ‘quite distant’ such as worries about one's children, finances, government, and the men in one's battalion. Thus, Ford devotes the vast majority of the tetralogy not to impressions of the trenches but to domestic disturbances in the form of adultery, divorce, repressed sexual passion, and the battle between the sexes.