Novel: Decline and Fall

Synopsis
Paul Pennyfeather, a gentle and naïve young man, is expelled from Oxford after a bizarre incident that links him to a scandalous house. Stripped of the usual career prospects for his class, he drifts into a series of unsuitable jobs and accidental associations that propel him into the underside of interwar English society.
His first paid post is as a teacher at a decaying proprietary boarding school where incompetence, greed and eccentricity mask themselves as respectable education. From there Paul is drawn into the orbit of fashionable and predatory figures whose social polish thinly conceals moral bankruptcy, and a succession of misunderstandings and bad luck turns his attempts at virtue into comic catastrophe.

Main character and companions
Paul Pennyfeather is an almost priestlike protagonist: modest, earnest and lacking the cynicism required to navigate the hypocritical worlds that he inhabits. His passivity becomes the novel's engine of comedy, as other characters project motives and intentions onto him that he neither understands nor deserves.
Around Paul whirl a gallery of grotesquely rendered foils: school proprietors who run their institution for profit, social climbers who buy respectability, and the glamorous figures of high society whose charms conceal exploitative instincts. These characters expose how appearances and reputation can be traded like currency at the expense of decency and truth.

Satirical targets
The novel skewers a wide range of English institutions: the cathedral of Oxford and its veneer of scholarship, the private-school system that pretends to form character while feeding off parents' vanity, and the fashionable social world that confuses money and notoriety with moral standing. Waugh delights in showing how authority and respectability can be fundamentally hollow.
Religion, law and class are recurrent targets. Clergymen, magistrates and titled figures are shown as vulnerable to the same selfishness and absurdity as anyone else, and the novel delights in reversing the expectations that privilege should confer virtue. The comedy often turns dark as satire edges toward a bleak account of social decay.

Tone and style
Waugh writes with a crisp, economical wit that balances affectionate mockery with a cold, clinical eye for absurdity. Sentences are often clipped, jokes delivered with the deadpan assurance of a master of comic timing, while scenes frequently close on a note of uncanny bleakness that undercuts the laugh.
Irony dominates: the more Paul tries to conform to social norms, the more those norms betray him. Waugh's prose pairs precise description with moral sharpness, making each ridiculous character and incident a small parable about the failures of modern English life.

Reception and legacy
Published in 1928, the novel announced a singular comic voice and established Waugh as a key satirist of his generation. Contemporary readers praised its technical skill and merciless humour, while later critics have debated the novel's mixture of light comedy and darker moral judgment.
Decline and Fall remains widely read both as an example of interwar satire and as an early expression of Waugh's concerns about social pretence, spiritual emptiness and the perils of modernity. Its ruthless comic vision and memorable central character continue to make it a staple of twentieth-century English fiction.