War and Peace - Tolstoy, Anne Dunnigan (trans.)
Influences In the Introduction to my version of The Iliad, Tolstoy is said to have claimed it as the highest achievement of storytelling. The analogies that run rampant through The Iliad are used in Tolstoy's style too... “Like a gambler who begins to win at cards, and instead of attributing this to the luck of his hands, instead believes he has discovered a winning method...” and so on. War and Peace is full of the Iliad . And For Whom the Bell Tolls is full of War and Peace . And sprigs of Vonnegut's style grow there too. Not only is Tolstoy a fan of “And so on,” he also sums up his book at the end with two pages of pure Vonnegut style: The tone is deadpan, every reason for the Napoleonic wars is a fallacy, and at the end there is a shrug about the inexplicable, arbitrary path of everything that has happened. Pierre is even a good reflection of Billy Pilgrim as he walks through battle scenes in his white suit, staring and seeming lost in thought, even developi...