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

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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. who was too visible to ignore and too heroic to court-martial -- the army hit upon a solution that the Soviet Union would later also find useful: Sassoon was declared to have suffered a nervous breakdown and he was sent The story has a dynamic, a flow of forces which has an uncertain result until the end comes. It starts in medias res at the point that Sassoon has already committed himself to a Christ-like course of action. Or rather to a Christ-like aspiration since he has been thwarted by his friend Robert Graves, an anti-Judas, from presenting himself before a courts martial of fellow officers, the equivalent of the prefecture of Pontius Pilate.

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.

The word "imagination" is one that has evolved throughout its many years in Biblical history. Its first and original meaning to the ancient Hebrews was that of "plotting or devising evil" rather than what we think of as imagination today: "the power of freely forming mental images" (Denton 685). The Hebrews thought of the power of the mind, for the most part, in the context of preparation for action rather than simply as a creative power (Denton 685). Although "imagination" in the biblical quote "The imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth" does mean the power to form mental images, it also has a sense of forming these images in preparation for evil action. Through this dual role of the imagination, that of plotting evil and creating images, we see the imagination as a double-edged sword that can be either destructive or constructive, depending on its use. Parenthood is linked in the novel to comradeship and caring. Parent-like protectiveness appears as a natural reaction to having men under one's command or patients under one's watch. Especially in wartime situations—in which control over many aspects of one's existence is so limited—a desire to protect others serves as an outlet for the need for some measure of control. Some examples in the novel are Prior's fatherly feelings for his troops, and the way many of the patients hold Rivers to be a surrogate father figure. The love interest for Billy Prior, Sarah, seems more like Barker's slim justification for writing the novel than an actual character. A bad attempt at connecting the civilian experience with the overseas one. There is a particularly annoying sequence where this character is lost in a hospital, runs into amputees, and finds the whole mess senseless, thereby coming to the same philosophical conclusion about the war as Prior, etc. As though getting lost in a hospital is equivalent to getting lost in the trenches. As though Barker's researching Sassoon's war experience is equivalent to Sassoon's having lived through it.

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 humanityMotifs are recurring structures, contrasts, and literary devices that can help to develop and inform the text's major themes. Regeneration towns of the Yorkshire coast where she grew up, her characters the depressed poor of those towns, particularly the women. In "Union Street,""Blow Your House Down" and "The Century's Daughter" The novel doesn't end with that trench fathering, though, but with Rivers's note closing his Sassoon file. Why there, when the rest of the historical story is so dramatic and moving? Why not follow Sassoon to the