Regeneration: The first novel in Pat Barker's Booker Prize-winning Regeneration trilogy (Regeneration, 1)

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is through fathering. "Fathering," he thinks, "like mothering, takes many forms beyond the biological. Rivers had often been touched by the way in which young men, some of them not yet 20, spoke about feeling The novel is thematically complex, exploring the effect of the War on identity, masculinity, and social structure. Moreover, the novel draws extensively on period psychological practices, emphasising Rivers' research as well as Freudian psychology. Through the novel Barker enters a particular tradition of representing the experience of World War I in literature: many critics compare the novel to other World War I novels, especially those written by women writers interested in the domestic repercussions of the war, including Rebecca West's The Return of the Soldier (1918) and Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway (1925). Barker both drew on those texts of the period that initially inspired her and makes references to a number of other literary and cultural works and events. These give an impression of historical realism, even though Barker tends to refute the claim that the novel is "historical fiction".

The Eye in the Door begins in the Spring of 1918. It continues the stories of Rivers, Sassoon, and Prior. There is a special focus on Prior in this novel of Barker's. Prior is now working for the domestic side of the military as he was medically discharged from fighting in Regeneration due to his asthma. He is now helping to investigate the plots of pacifist groups that are against the war. Prior is slightly uncomfortable with this. He is not a pacifist but is working class and does not like helping the authorities to spy on ordinary people. Regeneration" is different from those books in many ways. Its time is World War I; its location is mainly Scotland; its characters are nearly all men -- British Army officers, some of them historical figures; and

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Sarah Lumb – Sarah is a completely fictional character. The girlfriend of the character Billy Prior, she is working-class, " Geordie," and works in a munitions factory in Scotland producing armaments for British soldiers. Ada Lumb, her mother, appears briefly and has a hardened attitude towards love and relationships. Sassoon’s emotional state is at this point profoundly confused. As a platoon leader he has an intense loyalty to the men he commands, which is amplified by an equally intense need for the camaraderie that he finds with them at the front. However he also has an overwhelming revulsion for the horrors he and these men have experienced. And that revulsion is then associated through a sort of psychological transference with anyone who has not experienced those horrors yet remains enthusiastic for the war effort. Regeneration begins with Siegfried Sassoon's open letter, dated July 1917, protesting the conduct and insincerities of the First World War. The letter has been published in the London Times and has received much attention in England, as many people are upset over the length and toll of the war thus far. The army is not sure what to do with Sassoon, as his letter clearly threatens to undermine the strength of the war effort at home. Rivers is at the window when Sassoon arrives at the door to the mental hospital. He looks at the report and thinks it strange that Sassoon should have thrown away his medal for saving life. During a raid of the trenches, Sassoon had remained under fire and had risked his life to bring in all the dead and wounded from the field. Rivers watches as Sassoon overcomes his fear and walks into the gloomy building. Chapter 2

These damaged men fill the hospital. To regenerate them, Rivers must help them to confront the inhumanity of the war they have experienced, and to find ways of being human within it. For Rivers, the clearest way to humanity Johnson, Patricia E. (2005). "Embodying Losses in Pat Barker's Regeneration Trilogy". Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction. 46 (4): 307–319. doi: 10.3200/CRIT.46.4.307-319. S2CID 162918390. In her "Author's Note" for the novel, she describes the research which she used to create the novel, and how she drew on a number of sources from different period authors. The novel draws considerable inspiration from historical events. Literary critic Greg Harris describes her use of historical circumstances and historical source materials as largely, " "true" to the extent that the lives of the real-life characters, including Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, and Robert Graves, did intertwine." [7] Moreover, Harris argues that Barker accurately captures the psychological situation in which the characters, especially the literary characters, were producing their poetry. [7] French literary critic Marie-Noëlle Provost-Vallet highlights different misinterpretations and anachronistic cultural references supporting a critique of the novel by blogger and critic Esther MacCallum-Stewart. [8] However, she also notes the novel accurately assesses other parts of the historical context, such as the treatment of the World War I poets' and their poetic process. [8] Genre [ edit ] Are you serious? You honestly believe that that gaggle of noodle-brained half-wits down there has a complex mental life? Oh, Rivers’. Point of viewThird person omniscient; the narrator is not present or obtrusive in the text, yet is able to know the thoughts and feelings of each of the charactersTo End All Wars: Loyalty and Rebellion. Anti-war activists Bertrand Russell helped him draft his statement and Sylvia Pankhurst published it in her newsletter. Sassoon’s expectation was that a public court marshal would give him a platform for his message, while Russell and Pankhurst hoped that would trigger a movement of soldiers to follow the Bolshevik’s lead of laying down their weapons. Instead, the War Office a public statement proclaimed, “Sassoon has been reported by the medical board as not being responsible for his action, as he was suffering from a nervous breakdown.” Eventually, Sassoon chose to return to fighting at the front, noting in his diary that “I am only here to look after some men.” Hochschild summarizes: “It was a haunting reminder of the fierce power of group loyalty over that of political conviction—and all the more so because it came from someone who had not in the slightest changed, nor ever in his life would change, his belief that his country’s supposed war aims were fraudulent.”.

The novel is essentially the story of two men and their effects on each other. Both are in the army, and this is a war story though it takes place far from the battlefields. In July 1917, Second Lieut. Siegfried Sassoon, Military who is content to confront a cruel reality without polemics, without even visible anger and without evident artifice. stories are told, some historical, some not. One tells how the army's Medical Corps dealt with a new problem in military medicine that it was unprepared either to understand or to treat -- the large number of officers Regeneration" is an antiwar war novel, in a tradition that is by now an established one, though it tells a part of the whole story of war that is not often told -- how war may batter and break men's minds --

the war, whereas W. H. R. Rivers's pressure was very modern: to make soldiers well so they could return to the trenches.

It is through his poetry and the poetry of his friend Wilfred Owen that Sassoon finds the proper criterion for action. Both elements - the writing which objectifies the situation, and the relationship with Owen and others which corrects and amends the creative object - are necessary for the discernment of what constitutes Reason in a patently unreasonable world. Fortunately, unlike Christ’s friends, Sassoon’s didn’t sleep through his efforts. This is an experiment on a grand scale, a love-fest for the more academically inclined, 'interesting material' in the battered bodies and broken souls spit up out of a gigantic machine that has no rhyme or reason. This is the result of masculinity bred on stories of adventure and physical expertise, on shutting up and slimming down the emotions into unfeeling heroics and righteous fury, on boyhood dreams of being 'brave', let loose in comradeship in the face of corpses spit up in your face and death walking the grounds and laughing at your pitiful attempts to cope and spurring you on to love, but not too much. This is the immovable object meeting the oh so movable minds to the point of triumphing over matter, legs that refuse to move, tongues that refuse to speak, screams and cries and shrieks bleeding out of consciences that cannot reason out why and refuse to consider anything but the 'rational explanation'. p to now, Pat Barker has been a classic example of a working-class realistic novelist. Her territory has been the bleak industrial Rivers was intolerant and sympathetic. He was once compared to Moses laying down the law. The comparison was an apt one, and one side of the truth. The other side of him was his sympathy. It was a sort of power of getting into another man's life and treating it as if it were his own. And yet all the time he made you feel that your life was your own to guide, and above everything that you could if you cared make something important out of it. Paul, Ronald (2005). "In Pastoral Fields: The Regeneration Trilogy and Classic First World War Fiction". In Sharon Monteith; Margaretta Jolly; Nahem Yousaf; Ronald Paul (eds.). Critical Perspectives on Pat Barker. Critical Perspectives on Pat Barker. pp.147–61. ISBN 1-57003-570-9.Sassoon spent four months under Rivers's care -- playing golf, writing fiercely antiwar poems and talking with his doctor. At the end of that time he returned to active duty, evidently convinced that it was right to do Rivers, by pursuing a course of humane treatment, had established two principles that would be embraced by American military psychiatrists in the next war. He had demonstrated, first, that men of unquestioned bravery could succumb to overwhelming fear and, second, that the most effective motivation to overcome that fear was something stronger than patriotism, abstract principles, or hatred of the enemy. It was the love of soldiers for one another. On 5 November 2019, the BBC News listed Regeneration on its list of the 100 most influential novels. [27] According to academic critic Karin Westman, Regeneration was "well received by reviewers in both the UK and the United States." [28] Beyond frequent praise, the main points discussed often related to the veracity of Barker's depiction of the War period and about her role as a woman writer, along with the connections of this work to her previous novels. [28] Westman argues that many of these critics judged Barker's work on "content rather than style", so that this work allowed her to break from her earlier classification as a regional, working-class feminist into the "(male) canon of British literature". [28] The novel was even one of the "best novels of 1992", according to the New York Times. [1] [29]