REGENERATION - critical analysis, AO3 and AO5

'Where a reader cannot sympathise, the novelist seems to have failed' 

'Regeneration deliberately makes us uncertain of our sympathies' 

'The shifts of viewpoint seem calculated as much as to undermine our sympathies as to invite them'

'Prior's fate becomes a special concern of the novel because it is uncertain' 

'The novel largely imitates the appalled soliders' habits of repression' 

About Burns and the animals - 'We are left to explain as best we can his strange death-ritual and the satisfaction that it gives him' 

About Rivers and his comment on, 'poor all of them' - 'Ignorant reflex of a decent man...just the response that we, as readers, might now easily feel. Barker's achievement is to make us sense t he inadequacy of this sympathy'