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

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She desires nothing more than for her daughters to be the beneficiaries of a stable pension from their deceased husbands. In Regeneration, Sassoon is introduced as a conscientious objector to the war, despite his time as a soldier. He recovers the experience of warfare from the soldiers he treats, but knows nothing of it at first hand. Soon Sassoon is released for combat duty; Willard is able to overcome his psychosomatic paralysis and walks again; Anderson is given a staff job.

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Regeneration is the first book in Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy, followed by The Eye in the Door, which though featuring more fictional elements than its predecessor, continues the relationships between Billy Prior, Siegfried Sassoon, and Dr. The First World War was one of the first times society began to come to terms with the idea of trauma as a result of war. 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.Here, it becomes clear that fatherhood and motherhood tie into a larger issue of gender roles in society. Burns, who has since been discharged from hospital, invites Rivers to visit him at his family home in seaside Suffolk. 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.

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However, when a fellow female author directed her to the feminist publishing house Virago, the novel went on to critical success in 1982 and remains the publisher’s best-selling piece. 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. In her companion to the novel, Karin Westman sees the novel as a response by Barker to critics stereotyping her as only being interested in writing about women.The reader's awareness of this gives these characters, glimpsed in passing as Rivers makes his rounds of Craiglockhart, a haunting life. Barker could have joined her mother, she told The Guardian in 2003, but chose to stay with her grandmother "because of love of her, and because my stepfather didn't warm to me, nor me to him. Critic Greg Harris identifies Regeneration, along with the other two novels in the trilogy, as profiling the non-fictional experience of Sassoon and other soldiers who must deal with ideas of masculnity.

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Robert Graves – Another real life character, Graves is a fellow poet and friend of Sassoon who sees the war as unjust and immoral.

He is a war surgeon who has become traumatised by the sight of blood and is now struggling to get back into his profession.