Meanwhile, Sassoon tells Graves of his decision to return to war. In the same conversation, Graves stresses his heterosexuality, leaving Sassoon feeling of unease about his own sexual orientation. During a counselling session Sassoon talks to Rivers about the official attitude towards homosexuality.
Rivers theorises that during wartime the authorities are particularly hard on homosexuality, wanting to clearly distinguish between the "right" kind of love between men loyalty, brotherhood, camaraderie , which is beneficial to soldiers, and the "wrong" kind sexual attraction. 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.
The Choice: Book One of the Art of Remembrance Trilogy
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. Rivers spends his last day at the clinic saying goodbye to his patients, then travels to London and meets Dr. Lewis Yealland from the National Hospital, who will be his colleague in his new position.
Yealland uses electro-shock therapy to force patients to quickly recover from shell-shock; he believes that some patients do not want to be cured and that pain is the best method of treatment for such reluctant patients. Rivers questions whether he can work with a man who uses such techniques. Soon Sassoon is released for combat duty; Willard is able to overcome his psychosomatic paralysis and walks again; Anderson is given a staff job.
The novel ends with Rivers completing his notes, meditating on the effect that the encounter with Sassoon, and the last few months, have had on him. Many reviewers of the novel describe Sassoon as the main character. Although the character in Regeneration eventually returns to the front as did the historical Sassoon , Barker depicts him as remaining deeply ambivalent about warfare. Moreover, Sassoon held ambiguous feelings about his sexuality throughout his life: Rivers — Based upon the real-life W.
Rivers, Rivers is an English anthropologist, neurologist, and psychiatrist who worked at Craiglockhart War Hospital between and , his patients included Siegfried Sassoon amongst other literary figures. Barker describes him as the main character of the novel though some critics emphasise Rivers or Sassoon. This research inspired the title of the novel as well as some of the trilogy's major themes, such as trauma, injury, and healing.
In Barker's portrayal, Rivers suffers throughout the novel from the moral dilemma that he is treating soldiers in order that they can return to war. His approach is contrasted with the harsh treatment used by Dr. Moreover, throughout the novel Rivers is struggling with a nervous stammer he has had since childhood, even though his own father used to be a speech therapist.
In an interview with journalist Wera Reusch Barker called the historical Rivers "very humane, a very compassionate person who was tormented really by the suffering he saw, and very sceptical about the war, but at the same time he didn't feel he could go the whole way and say no, stop. Billy Prior — Prior is one of the few purely fictional characters in the book. Prior is a soldier at Craiglockhart who suffers from mutism and asthma.
According to critic Patricia Johnson, Prior's inability to speak highlights the novel's treatment of Western culture's inability to verbalise the mutilation of bodies caused by war. Straddling the class divide, Prior sees the British army mirroring the class system, even in the trenches. Prior often envies those who are not involved in the war experience, such as Sarah, his love interest in the novel.
As he develops in the Regeneration Trilogy , the novels reveal Prior as bisexual. He is a man fundamentally at war with himself: David Burns — David Burns, another patient at Craiglockhart War Hospital, is a fictionalised version of one of Rivers' real patients who is described in the psychologist's case studies. Burns has been unable to eat after a bomb explosion threw him headlong into the gas-filled belly of a corpse, which caused him to swallow some of the rotting flesh.
Critic Patricia Johnson explains that this experience of traumatic embodied experiences, epitomises the novel's strong use of visual descriptions of the war to help the reader recognise wars horrors see the War themes section below. Wilfred Owen — The fictional Owen is based upon the actual poet who died just before the end of the war in His posthumously published poems greatly increased his reputation.
Anderson — Anderson is another patient at Craiglockhart War hospital. Once a surgeon, Anderson's experiences of war have made it impossible to continue practising medicine because he now hates the sight of blood after experiencing a mental breakdown. 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.
Lewis Yealland — A foil to Rivers, Yealland is based on a doctor of that name at the National Hospital in London who used electro-shock therapy to treat his patients. Yealland is portrayed as arrogant and uncaring. He believes that the characters that breakdown during the war are "weak" and says that they would break down in civilian life anyway.
Callan — Callan is a patient of Dr.
'Death's End' Brings An Epic Trilogy To A Satisfying Close : NPR
Yealland who has served in every major battle in World War I. He finds himself in the care of Dr.
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Yealland after suffering from mutism. Callan tries to fight against his doctor's treatment but eventually gives in to it. Robert Graves — Another real life character, Graves is a fellow poet and friend of Sassoon who sees the war as unjust and immoral. However, Graves does not want to make his life more difficult by protesting. Graves sees it as his duty to serve his country regardless of his own moral beliefs. Because Regeneration is a novel that focuses on the First World War , it explores many of the themes common to literature written during and following the war , including the cause and effects of war, the limits of ideologies like nationalism and masculinity, and both the medical and popular reactions to the psychological traumas created in the war.
Critics have treated each of these extensively.
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Moreover, because much of Barker's earlier work was historical fiction about women, critics often comment on her treatment of women in the novel. The novel extensively focuses on the effects of losses during wartime. As The Guardian noted when discussing her awards for The Ghost Road , the series gave her the reputation as "The woman who understood war".
She goes on to state that "One of the things that impresses me is that two things happen to soldiers in war: It's really focusing on the people who do come back but don't come back alright, they are either physically disabled or mentally traumatised. 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.
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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 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.
'Death's End' Brings An Epic Trilogy To A Satisfying Close
I think because of that it's come to stand for the pain of all wars. The tension between traditional models of masculinity and the experiences within the war runs throughout the novel. Barker agrees with his assessment, saying, "and what's so nice about them is that they use it so unself-consciously: In his discussion of the novel, Harris describes this "manliness" as becoming, for Barker's characters, an "unrealistic militaristic-masculine ideals"; practices such as the deliberate repression of emotion consume the novel's characters and create psychological instability, as well as being the cause of extensive discrimination during the war.
The novel's use of a mental hospital as the main setting, along with psychologist Rivers' treatments of soldiers and their war trauma, focuses much of the novel on the psychological effects of war. In doing so, the novel follows in the tradition of novels like The Return of the Soldier and Mrs. For instance, Ankhi Mukherjee describes the failure of characters to turn their memories into a narrative through the medium of talk therapy.
Sigmund Freud is an important influence on the novel's approach to psychology, [20] and this influence has roots in the historical context of the novel, because Rivers was influenced by the writings of Freud on neurosis and Sassoon wrote about the experience of Freudian psychoanalysis in his Sherston's Progress.
Some critics have written extensively on the place of women within the novel, even though it focuses on men.
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The men go off and fight and the women stay at home and cry; basically, this is the typical feature. And the women in the trilogy are always deeply significant, and whatever they say in whatever language they say it in, it is always meant to be listened to very carefully. The female perspectives within the novel is rare in war fiction and provides a larger sense of the domestic repercussions.
Dalloway that deal with the repercussions of the war and whose author was not a male soldier. The novel, like its two sequels, relies heavily on allusion to, and appropriation of, both historical and literary texts. The "Author's note" for each novel, as critic Allistair M. Duckworth points out, explicitly outlines historical texts that Barker relied on when writing that novel.
Joyes highlights how Barker alters Wilfred Owen's poems so that the reader can witness Owen and Sassoon revise them at Craiglockhart. The following are some of the most prominent intertextual components in the novel:. Writing in , Westman describes the novel selling well in the ten years since its publication. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. For the film adaptation of the novel, see Regeneration film.
British women's literature of World War I. Archived from the original on 26 April Retrieved 11 May Set in the near past as well as the near future, it depicts the first contact between a Chinese physicist and an alien race whose interest in Earth is less than benign — a timeworn idea that Liu rendered with complexity, nuance, and plenty of head-spinning astrophysics. As trilogy-cappers go, it's satisfying — entirely on its own terms, though. Like the two installments before it, Death's End focuses on a different protagonist. In this case, it's Cheng Xin, a rocket scientist from our era revived from artificial hibernation half a century in the future.
The world she finds is not the one she remembers: But this new age of peace and technological prosperity is a precarious one, as she discovers when she's charged with maintaining Earth's defenses against an enemy that isn't going to give up so easily. The bones of the premise are nothing new, but Liu continues to elaborately dress them. The plot telescopes out not merely for decades, but for centuries. One universe not enough? There are plenty more. How about some extra texts? There are numerous stories-within-stories nested in Death's End , including a sequence of lushly told fairytales that show off Liu's virtuosity, not to mention some sparkling, much-needed contrast with the heavier sci-fi tone of the rest of the work.
Within this intricately structured, staggeringly cosmic, reality-contorting framework, he weaves all the personal and philosophical conflicts he's seeded along the way into a resoundingly orchestrated finale. Unfortunately, a few of the flaws of the first two books are ported into Death's End.