Examine the Presentation of WW1 In “Regeneration” and Comment On the Effectiveness of the Blend of Fact and Fiction and the Attitudes Revealed Through the Writers Approach.

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Examine the presentation of WWI in "Regeneration" and comment on the effectiveness of the blend of fact and fiction and the attitudes revealed through the writers approach.

The novel produces an eloquent statement against the madness of war. The story is closely based on the publications and annotated literary papers of three men who actually met at Craiglockhart Hospital, Edinburgh, in 1917: psychiatrist W. H. R. Rivers and the poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen.

Barker probes the tenacious role of class within the military hierarchy, while the society, which it defends, is rapidly transformed by the converging lives of domestic servants and aristocrats. Her descriptions are powerful: the yellow skin of women who work in the munitions factory; the surgeon who can no longer bear the sight of blood; the young soldier who cannot eat because his nose and mouth had once been filled with rotting flesh when he was hoisted by a grenade into the decomposing belly of a dead German. These descriptions all put the war exactly how it was. No pleasantries. No lies. Just honesty and candid details.
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The author portrays the experience of severe traumatic stress principally through the interactions between several soldiers and their physician, Rivers. All of the characters are recreations of known people. Rivers was a distinguished neurologist and social anthropologist whose published work informs the clinical aspects of the novel. The "shell-shock" patients were known individuals. Siegfried Sassoon was a major English poet and an army officer decorated for gallantry under fire. Wilfred Owen was another poet who, subsequent to the hospital stay depicted in the novel, returned to the front and died in action in 1918.

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