Sympathy in Regeneration essay

‘In Regeneration, Barker deliberately makes us uncertain of where our sympathies lie’

To what extent do you agree that Barker creates characters we cannot fully sympathise within the novel?

In Regeneration, Barker has an array of characters that stir different emotions within the reader dependent on their situation. There are multiple characters that the reader can empathise with due to their pasts or current situations. Burns, for example, suffered a traumatic experience while fighting by being “thrown into the air by the explosion of a shell and had landed, head-first, on a German corpse, whose gas-filled belly had ruptured on impact”. His behaviour of being unable to eat and wandering out in the night elicits sympathy for Burns due to the fact that the only time the novel “does take us inside Burns’ mind, it is to register his suffering” (from article). Burns is one of the easier characters to sympathise with, along with slightly more minor characters such as Mrs Prior and Anderson.

Mrs Prior is a character that Barker has created that we can fully sympathise with. Her son, Billy Prior, is an officer of whom she is extremely proud. However, she constantly has to challenge her husband on feeling this pride as it is something he does not share in. When meeting with Rivers, she is “playing with her wedding ring”, indicating that her marriage may not be an entirely happy one. Mrs Prior sympathises with her son because she feels as if “[she] knows how hard it’s been” for him to fight on the front line and live the life that he’s had. Due to the sympathies shown from her, it makes it easier to fully sympathise as we begin to empathise with her.

However, Barker does present some characters that we cannot fully sympathise with due to their attitude towards other people and their lives or because of their circumstance. A leading character in the novel, Siegfried Sassoon is headstrong and determined to get his anti-war viewpoint across to as many people as possible, sometimes in an abrupt way, making it difficult to fully sympathise with him. Through the first two parts of the…