Satire, burlesque and comedy are not primary characteristics of Simon's work. The subject matter of his novels derives not least from the trials and traumas of personal experience: the absence of his father, killed at the Front in 1914; the death of his mother when he was still a boy; early rejection of the Catholic faith in which he was brought up and of its secularised substitute, Marxism, which seduced so many young intellectuals of the inter-war years; above all, his personal experience of the debacle of 1940: eight days advancing then retreating on horseback before the German tanks, the annihilation of the regiment, the death in ambush of its colonel, Simon's own unaccountable survival. Hence flow many of the themes that dominate his fiction: war, death, grief and grieving, disillusionment, the meaning – if there is one – of history, and the fragmentary, haunting survival of experience in memory. Yet there is another side to Simon's work. The tragic tone of his novels is relieved not just by recurring delight in the sounds, smells, tastes and, above all, sights which the world offers in varied abundance. There are also moments of scrutiny of others and of the self, when judgements are passed, severe or clement, or when, from a distanced perspective, irony or humour lighten the load of history.

Since the publication of Les Géorgiques and L'Invitation critics have increasingly commented on Simon's sometimes stinging critique of linguistic usages, aesthetic principles, monolithic ideologies of progress and their flawed champions. Not until the mid-1990s, however, did critical reflection begin to respond to Stuart Sykes's plea for a ‘developed essay on parody, satire and irony’. Mária Minich Brewer set parody in the context of postmodernism, while Pierre Schoentjes studied situational and verbal irony in Les Géorgiques. Sykes's own remark that the tone of La Route des Flandres is ‘à mi-chemin entre la comédie et le tragique’ was taken up in two 1997 articles. Alexandre Didier used Bergson and Freud to analyse techniques of irony and humour in La Route des Flandres; Nathalie Piégay-Gros studied how parody and competing narrative voices in that novel tip epic into burlesque. Simon's own comments on this approach to his work have been few and relatively discouraging. He has expressed a distaste for verbal irony which, in the French tradition, as Schoentjes remarks, he tends to associate with the idea of mockery.