A Study Of Pat Barker’s War Novels

Pat Barker is one of the few contemporary British writers who have been praised as the most brilliant and productive. Until now she has published12novels, with her first three concentrating on the life of working class females in the towns and cities of the Northeastern part of Yorkshire in England, where she was born and grew up. However, she is best known to readers for The Regeneration Trilogy-a series of three novels on the subject of the First World War, namely Regeneration in1991, The Eye in the Door in1993, and The Ghost Road in1995, which won her the Booker Prize in the same year of its publication. Then after a ten-year lapse in writing about contemporary British life, she returned to her haunting subject of the First World War in2007, when Life Class was published, and then its parallel Toby’s Room in2012. Barker is acclaimed by the public not only as a female writer approaching the subject of war from her unique perspective but also as an artist re-visioning the issues of the British society in terms of its family life, its social life, and its established cultural conventions during the circumstances of the war period. She expresses her characters’attempt to reconstruct values beyond differences based on class and power domination through her artistic presentation of British society during that time.Shell shock as a phenomenon during and after the war, known later as the post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), was the human mind’s reaction to the stress resulting from Victorian gentility and and its dominant principles. It became an illustration of the unspeakable and unrepresentable. Barker exposes the physical wound and the psychological trauma caused by the implicit injustice and violence in the British conventions and establishment through her representation of social, political and historical situations.The dissertation has three parts:introduction, body and conclusion.The introduction first makes clear that the subject of war is nearly as ancient as human existence, and its immoral causes draw an ethical as well as aesthetic response from the artist. Then it presents a survey of scholarship on Barker published thus far in the English speaking world in contrast to the lack of critique in China, which indicates the need for further academic research and serious assessment. Finally, it shows that the focus of this study is to be on Barker’s retrospective narrative which she uses to further a dialogue between history and today, the past and the present.The body part has four chapters. The first chapter is to deconstruct the war myth, which is so well-established in British society in the form of rational myth, hero myth and gender myth. Barker presents her connoted message by way of the fact of the body to counterpoint the dominant effects of such cultural conventions.The second chapter is to focus on war memory and its remembrance by first showing the paradoxical and complicating nature of memory itself so that the distorted or simplistic representation of the guided remembrance is to be recognized and taken into consideration, and then by analyzing how the monument memory unites its people through patriotism during the war, while it simultaneously ignores human’s need of rituals of bereavement for the fallen. Barker adopts the language of the body in the nightmarish memory to demonstrate the harm done to those who suffered tremendously on the battlefield.The third chapter discusses Barker’s acknowledgment of the problematics of representation. She uses the retrospective narrative to show how poetry and painting could provide effective evidence in opposition to what was restrained by the war propaganda at that critical historical moment.Chapter Four explores what the female writer has contributed to war writing based on what has been done by male writers in terms of accomplishment and social competition. Barker inherits what Virginia Woolf achieved on the subject of war, indicating that the female vision has nothing to do with gender nor anything to do with the female sex. What actually counts is the discarded qualities of keeping the wholeness of human beings-sympathy, compassion, and intuition-experienced only by individuals through trial and error during their critical pursuit of truth. Such a way of looking at the only life human beings have is expressed through its perpetual deferral in narration, in which the irresolution seems to reflect a possibility of a larger vision in contrast to the prevalent ironic narrative adopted by most male writers.The conclusion shows Barker’s consistent pursuit of truth and meaning in spite of her critical questioning of the social injustice and violence, which is constructive in itself in the the current state of aborted language and essence while encountering some of the most momentous changes in the modern English history and society. At the heart of the matter is Barker’s belief and determination through the form of fiction not to relinquish the hope of making readers think deeply and feel strongly as part of a single, unified reaction instead of providing alternative modes of reaction.The dissertation adopts a perspective of interdisciplinary achievement and applies, in particular, a form of double vision for its exploration, that is, it parallels the historical with the retrospective, the medium of texts with that of non-text, facts with interpretation, both views from top down and bottom up, the general and the particular, science and arts, etc., to show both the obvious and hidden perspectives of the historiographic project, so that a panorama of the dynamic social’ process and transformation is presented by the inclusiveness of attitude and the admission of the subtlety and complexity of life itself.