I suppose most of them turn you into Daddy, don’t they? Well, I’m a bit too old to be sitting on Daddy’s knee.’ Now that Sassoon has arrived at the hospital, he meets with Rivers to talk over tea. Having tea gives Rivers a chance to evaluate the mental state of his patient. The two men have a pleasant conversation. Sassoon tells Rivers that the medical board has been rigged; the decision to send him to a mental hospital was made before the Board even evaluated him. It is easier for the Board to pass his letter off as madness rather than admit that it represents a valid charge against the government. Sassoon admits that he does not have any religious reason for opposing the war; he is merely horrified at the senseless brutality of it. 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

After a very busy day, Rivers wakes up in the middle of the night with chest pain; his doctor insists that he take three weeks vacation. During these three weeks, he visits his brother's house and reflects on his relationship with his deceased father. Rivers then visits his old friend Henry Head, who offers him a terrific job at a war hospital in London. Finally Rivers visits Burns's house in Suffolk for a few days. The Review Board has given Burns an unconditional discharge from the army. While at Suffolk, Burns has an episode and tries to commit suicide by hiding in a hole that floods at high tide. Rivers finds Burns, however, and saves him. Much of the novel explores the types of cultural ideologies, like nationalism and masculinity, that facilitated the War. Barker states that she chose to write about World War I "because it's come to stand in for other wars, as a sort of idealism of the young people in August 1914 in Germany and in England. They really felt this was the start of a better world. And the disillusionment, the horror and the pain followed that. I think because of that it's come to stand for the pain of all wars." [2] Critic Kaley Joyes argues that choices like the inclusion of the work by poet Wilfred Owen in the novel, whose life has been romanticised as "an expressive exemplar of the war's tragic losses," highlights this thematic interest in breaking down the common ideological interpretations of the war. [15] Masculinity [ edit ]I am making this statement as an act of wilful defiance of military authority because I believe that the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it. I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers. I believe that the war upon which I entered as a war of defence and liberation has now become a war of aggression and conquest. I believe that the purposes for which I and my fellow soldiers entered upon this war should have been so clearly stated as to have made it impossible to change them and that had this been done the objects which actuated us would now be attainable by negotiation.

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. The modern classic of contemporary war fiction from Women's Prize-shortlisted author of The Silence of the Girls, Regeneration is a powerfully moving portrait of the deep legacy of human trauma in the First World War. The next time Rivers meets with him, Prior’s voice has returned. We revise our first impression of Prior at the same time as Rivers, and through his eyes and ears: He recovers the experience of warfare from the soldiers he treats, but knows nothing of it at first hand. He is teaching his men to remember, but he approaches their memories as a foreigner, guiltily wishing that he had been able to fight. Disconcertingly, though he treats his patients with something close to tenderness, he is not some anti-war hero with whom the contemporary reader can easily identify. He believes that "the war must be fought to a finish, for the sake of the succeeding generations".

Retailers:

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 novel has been treated both as a war novel and an anti-war novel. In her 2004 interview with critic Rob Nixon, Barker describes her conceptualisation of that boundary: neuroses were not to be found in their childhoods nor in their sex lives, but in the traumas of their war experiences. Concerning the war he was an Englishman of his class and generation (Rivers was 53 in 1917): he considered