Early on in The Fractal Geometry of Nature, Benoit Mandelbrot foregrounds the western coast of Britain as a paradigmatic instance of a fractal object in nature, combining pattern with irregularity at ever-diminishing levels of scales.That emblematic status is curiously anticipated by the land's-end vision from Snowdon which closes Wordsworth’s Prelude. Criticism has long recognized the totalizing function of the ascent of Snowdon. This essay seeks to emphasize the way in which it interrupts the narrative process it recapitulates and to connect that interruption with the irregularity or fractiousness of fractal form.

Critics have long been puzzled by aspects of William Wordsworth’s “The Discharged Soldier” (1798), such as the abrupt opening, the soldier’s disinterest in telling his story in a genre that requires it, and the speaker’s lack of effusive sympathy. Wordsworth’s theory of desert provides a new way to understand the poem, and a key to understanding the poem’s interplay between capacity and aesthetics. The chapter focuses on the military body and, in particular, the stories about the acquisition of impairments that fictional disabled soldiers are required to tell. Disabled soldiers’ stories often make persuasive cases for desert (in that soldiers are deemed worthy of charity or reward).