The tension between traditional models of masculinity and the experiences within the war runs throughout the novel. [7] Critic Greg Harris identifies Regeneration, along with the other two novels in the trilogy, as profiling the non-fictional experience of Sassoon and other soldiers who must deal with ideas of masculnity. [7] These characters feel conflicted by a model of masculinity common to Britain during this time: honour, bravery, mental strength, and confidence were privileged "manly" characteristics. [7] Yet they explore, internally and through conversation, what that model means for them and how the war changes how they should experience it. [7] In an interview with Barker in Contemporary Literature, Rob Nixon distinguishes between these ideas of "manliness" and the concept of masculinity as providing a larger definition for identity. Barker agrees with his assessment, saying, "and what's so nice about them is that they use it so unself-consciously: they must have been the last generation of men who could talk about manliness without going "ugh" inside." [5] One of the focuses of the novel is on how combatants perceive their experiences. In her article discussing the novel's representation of death, literary critic Patricia E. Johnson describes how contemporary society tends to make the casualties and experience of war more abstract, making it hard for non-combatants to imagine the losses. [14] Johnson argues that the entire Regeneration Trilogy breaks the boundaries created by modern society's abstraction of war and its casualties because "mutilation and death are re-presented in a ways that escape warfare's typical conceptual categories, thus..."realising" modern warfare by reconnecting language and material substance." [14] In discussing the first novel specifically, Johnson highlights how the book "repeatedly employs synecdoche" to emphasise the visceral experiences, by describing eviscerated human flesh and how the characters respond to those experiences. [12] She describes experiences like Burns's horrifying head first disembowelment of a corpse as allowing the readers to understand two things: first, that memories of the combatants are recorded in terms of their relationship to actual people, rather than in the vague ideas of people represented by war memorials; and second, the conceptual opposition in Western culture between flesh or body parts and the social definition of a person (for further discussion of this philosophical issue see Mind-body problem). [12] Ideology [ edit ]

I don't like to call it feminine," she noted with some irony, "but what you have really is a sense of mothering the men, not fathering." 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] How to make something new out of the classics? The tension between novelty and the weight of tradition is one that many writers since Homer have felt. David Malouf, in his novel “ Ransom” (2012), also based on the Iliad, ingeniously makes that struggle the subject of his story, in which Priam’s unprecedented gesture toward his mortal enemy, Achilles, becomes a canny metaphor for the possibility of “novelty” in storytelling. Like so many others, Barker wants to impose her modern concerns onto this very ancient material. But she’s not nearly comfortable enough in her Greek mode to fashion a work of real authority. 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 like fathers to their men." If you are a father to your men, then your place is with them, whatever you may think about the war.

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W.H.R. Rivers: A Founding Father Worth Remembering. Human-nature.com. Retrieved on 21 October 2011. 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".

Soon, the medical board review the soldiers' cases deciding on their fitness for combat. Prior receives permanent home service due to his asthma. Prior breaks down, fearing that he will be seen as a coward. Sassoon, tired of waiting for his board, leaves the hospital to dine with a friends, causing conflict with Rivers. Following the medical board, Prior and Sarah meet again and admit their love. Sassoon and Owen discuss Sassoon's imminent departure and Owen is deeply affected. Sassoon comments to Rivers that Owen's feelings may be more than mere hero worship. 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 Sassoon becomes friends with another patient, Wilfred Owen. Owen aspires to be a poet and respects Sassoon's work; Sassoon agrees to help with his poetry. things of the world, can make imagined places actual and open other lives to the responsive reader, and that by living those lives through words a reader might be changed. Pat Barker must believe that, or she wouldn'tSassoon’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. Prior arrives in Rivers’s office late one night, notably less obstinate than usual and visibly depressed, finally admitting much about his nightmares that he’d formerly withheld. Rivers offers to hypnotize him to help him remember his main traumatic incident and Prior agrees. In a trance, Prior recalls cleaning a trench, shoveling the body parts of two of his men who had just been killed by an artillery strike into a bag, when he finds himself holding a single eyeball in his palm, which triggers his mind to break down and leaves him mute. When Prior awakes from the hypnosis memory, he is both horrified and angered that there was not more to it. However, he grabs Rivers by the arm and begins head-butting him in the chest, which is as close as he can get to asking Rivers for physical affection, since he is a man.

There are many soldiers with various problems and ailments in the hospital. Burns, an emaciated man, has been unable to eat since a shell threw him into the gas-filled stomach of a German corpse. Anderson, a former war surgeon, is now terrified at the sight of blood, and is worried about resuming his civilian medical practice. Prior, a young, stubborn, and slightly difficult patient, enters the hospital suffering from mutism. Rivers meets with each of them in turn, helping them to recover from their problems.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.

ToneMatter-of-fact, realistic, and resigned; the narrator does not gloss over details or make them any more palatable for the reader very objectively rational, someone who found it very difficult to integrate his emotions with the rest of his life, very much a product of his Victorian and Edwardian education. He learned to integrate his nurturing side. Sometimes she seems aware of this herself. Early on in “The Silence of the Girls,” Briseis reflects on the poems that she heard as a child in her father’s palace: “All the songs were about battles, about the exploits of great men.” Only much later does she come to understand that rather than retelling worn old tales—as she herself has just done in narrating this book—she should have broken away and created “a new song” altogether. “I’d been trying to escape . . . from Achilles’ story,” she admits. “And I’d failed.” ♦ 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.The Silence of the Girls” was one of a number of recent novels—including Margaret Atwood’s “ The Penelopiad” and Madeline Miller’s “ Circe”—to take on Homer’s epics, challenging their assumptions by telling the old tales from a female perspective. A generation earlier, there was the East German writer Christa Wolf’s “ Cassandra” (1983), which deftly repurposed Homer’s Trojan tales as a parable at once feminist and political, using the myths to explore subjects such as the police state and censorship. 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.