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

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A conscientious objector is a term used to describe a person who refuses to join an army or participate in violence based on moral grounds. These may be religious or personal reasons.

AntagonistMadness; Rivers and his patients must fight against the war neuroses in an attempt to heal, but first they must determine what the madness is Barker is most famous for her later work, especially her Great War trilogy consisting of Regeneration (1991), The Eye in the Road (1993), and The Ghost Road (1995). This trilogy allowed Barker to expand her thematic range and refine her excellent writing skills. Regeneration received critical acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic and won numerous awards, including the short list for Britain's prestigious Booker Prize and a recommendation from the New York Times Book Review as one of the four best novels of the year.

boarded-up terrace houses and urban wastelands where such women exist must be as she describes it. To my mind her fourth novel, "The Man Who Wasn't There," is less successful. Barker had long appreciated the literary figures she draws inspiration from in the novel: she read the World War I poetry of Sassoon and Owen as well as Rivers' Conflict and Dream in her youth. [4] However, Barker directly attributes the immediate inspiration for Regeneration to her husband, a neurologist familiar with the writings of Dr. W.H.R. Rivers and his experiments with nerve regeneration. [4] In a 2004 interview with literary critic Rob Nixon in the journal Contemporary Literature, Barker also states she wrote the novel, in part, as a response to how her earlier fiction was being received; she said,

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.Starting the section, Sarah tells her mother, Ada, about her relationship with Billy Prior. Ada scolds her daughter for having sex outside marriage. A few chapters later, Sarah discovers that another munitions worker attempted a home abortion with a coat-hanger, but only harms herself. 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). Barker is not the only novelist to draw heavily on real events and historical texts, or to direct readers towards the histories she has used, but she is clearly wandering into the historian’s territory here. After all, what do historians do but construct an account of events based on historical documents and on the work of previous historians? Although all but the most extreme postmodernist would agree that there is a clear difference between fiction and history, the lines are not as clearly drawn as it might first appear. Barker does not only tell a story, she implicitly provides an analysis of events and judgments on issues such as the legitimacy of war; she continually nudges the reader towards meaning. Historians might do this in different ways (most of us accept that we’re not allowed to make things up, whereas this is part of the novelist’s job description), but they never simply write ‘what happened’; they seek to explain it, and although these explanations are mostly explicit, they too unconsciously nudge readers towards meaning in ways which are less overt, including imposing certain boundaries on their subject matter, such as the period covered, the type of sources used, the selection of material, and the interpretations presented to the audience. When Bourke chooses to use the use the unpublished diaries, letters, and memoirs of ordinary soldiers, she privileges a particular perspective on the war above others, and her choices are doubtless informed by a political standpoint which filters into her sense of what history should be and who it serves. This is not so different from Barker’s invention of Prior to tell a story she believes needs to be told, although one is a project of invention and the other a project of recovery.