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Regeneration Essay

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Regeneration Essay
Regeneration by Pat Barker, is an attempt to illustrate the lasting psychological effects the helplessness and terror of no man’s land had on survivors of the First Great War. Rather than focusing on the battlefields of World War I, Barker sets Regeneration in Craiglockhart hospital, a real hospital treating soldiers for war neurosis during the period dramatised in the novel. Regeneration revolves around Capt. Siegfried Sassoon’s (Dec.) protest of the war (an historic event), and Dr. W.H.R. Rivers’ (Capt. Dec.) diagnosis that he does not “even think [Sassoon’s] got war neurosis.” Barker’s dramatisation of the relationship between Rivers and Sassoon attempts to demonstrate the meaninglessness of war while ostensibly forcing Rivers to face the real horrors endured by his patients (Barker 15). …show more content…
The interplay between the characters portrayed in Regeneration illustrates the complex relationships between doctor and patient, officer and enlisted, and father and son. And, while Barker expertly stages these complex relationships against the horrifying backdrop of the First Great War, she fails to explore the dominant political, medical, and social attitudes surrounding war neurosis during this period. In this paper, I will demonstrate that Pat Barker’s Regeneration is a failed attempt to portray the psychological effects WWI had on soldiers and misrepresents the inhumane treatments inflicted upon those suffering from war neurosis during the period the author purports to
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