Task ONE

Pat Barker challenges typical attitudes to class and social division during WW1 through Regeneration. She uses her characters; Rivers, Prior and Sassoon to portray her ideas. The language and the register she uses are also ways of expressing her thoughts. Symbolisms are used to enlarge her ideas and make them into bigger pictures.There is a present of prejudice within the book; in Chapter 6 Rivers judges Prior and comes up with the whole portrait of Prior – just based on Prior’s “Northern accent”. This seems like a type of prejudice because the North was a less wealthy part of England at that time. Judging people by their regional accents is quite a harsh thing to do. Wealth is not relevant to the judgments of personalities. For Sassoon, he wrote “A Soldier’s Declaration”, which was supposed to be publically published, but he was soon muted by the higher-ranked generals. He was the same as other soldiers even though he had the guts to become the spokesman. As a low-class soldier, he was silenced.Pat Barker uses a simple language to make it as genuine and historical as possible. Plus simplistic language helps the reader to understand more of Pat Barker’s messages to the readers; therefore she creates a stronger relationship between her and the readers. Simplistic language here is straightforward descriptions and speeches, no fanciness. This allows the readers to think more freely and paint the picture of the scenes more easily. In Chapter 4, Anderson told Rivers about his dreams. “Nudity, snakes, corsets”. Being naked in the public would make a man feel awful and “emasculated”? The soldiers’ uniform is a symbol to the soldiers’ masculinity. It shows that they have responsibilities to their country but also to the women who are waiting at home. Making a man wearing corsets is emasculating that man – taking away his masculinity and giving him the characteristics of a woman. Corsets and uniforms are symbolic due to the social division problems.Also in Chapter 4, the nineteen year-old boy, who “had a neat little hole. Only his was between his legs.” This gives the readers the idea of the boy being castrated. A man without his “manly-part” cannot live his fully life and cannot do his duties expected by the community. Those duties are usually getting married and give births. A man living his life without his “manly-part” could be seen as living a “half-life”.