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The most autobiographical of Evelyn Waugh's novels, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold is closely based on the events of a psychotic break the author suffered in 1954. Though the breakdown was diagnosed as drug-induced, no adequate explanation of Waugh's symptoms or what he made of them in the novel has ever appeared in print. Few commentators seem to know exactly what to do with Pinfold, and the work is especially difficult to integrate with the canon. Sandwiched as it is, along with the Knox biography and the African travel memoirs, between the last two last parts of The Sword of Honor Trilogy, it occupies a peculiar but distinctive place in the chronology. Its significance becomes apparent, however, when we discern it as an embodiment of personality characteristics which had been observed by Waugh's biographer, Christopher Sykes, and other friends for many years: a “persecution mania,”1 insomnia, unrelenting depression, hallucinations, cruelty, and homosexuality. Taken together, these can be seen as constituting the larger behavioral pattern that today is called paranoia.
Pinfold/Waugh himself half realizes this. As Pinfold sits musing over his adventures at the end of the novel, he asks himself one key question:
What I can't understand is this,” he said. “If I was supplying all the information to the Angels [his imaginary persecutors], why did I tell them such a lot of rot? I mean to say, if I wanted to draw up an indictment of myself, I could make a far blacker and more plausible case than they did. I can't understand.