Both Regeneration and Private Peaceful are set in the First World War and are strongly shaped by time and memory. Private Peaceful overshadows the young Soldier Tommo Peaceful and his older brother Charlie, and is told in a simple but eloquent style. It follows the brothers through the internal and external journey of war, particularly exploring the theme of trying to come to terms with “living two separate lives in two separate ones.” “worlds”. Morpurgo not only portrays the atrocities of war for two young people, but also the idyllic but highly hierarchical English rural life, as Barker stated in an interview with Wera Resch that "The trilogy tries to tell something about the parties of the war that do not enter into official accounts" Private Peaceful is itself an account of the private side of the war, but like Regeneration; it places its characters' struggles in historically well-developed social and gender contexts. Say no to plagiarism Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay Regeneration was written with a tone mixed with irony. and anger; both are missing from the history books. This novel is best known for showing the disillusionment, horror and turmoil that came after the Great War rather than in it arguably one of the main themes of Regeneration; although less so in Private Peaceful as it is shown in particular through the relationship that the two brothers have with Molly and the maternal role that must be assumed or rejected by the two boys towards Big Joe. In Regeneration, the importance of this theme is shown through a variety of different ways. Prior's character in particular embodies the conflicts experienced by soldiers at the time. Prior is a more complicated character than perhaps others in the novel, as the aforementioned conflicts were not only felt during and after his time as a soldier, but were also present in his childhood; hence the brief glimpse the reader is granted of Prior's past when his parents visit Craiglockhart. Prior's parents have two completely conflicting goals for their son, which may suffice as part of the explanation of his conflicted nature: shown in stuttering and slurred speech such as "to think that maybe if..." followed closely by " hand". Prior's mother protected him to the point that he grew up sensitive, while his father preferred him to be raised more independently, allowing him to solve his own dilemmas. It is very likely that his parents' perspectives influenced their son's attitude towards his life in the hospital and his beliefs about the war. Social class also influenced Prior's state of inner turmoil; the label of "temporary gentlemen" was added due to his lower class birth. When Prior was asked by Rivers how he adapted to the front, his "face closed" and he replied that it was "immediately clear who was accepted on the front lines and who was not". Prior said he was aware he could never meet expectations of high-level qualifications such as wearing “the right shirt” or having attended “the right school.” Barker's inclusion of the experience of these Priors and his own social position within British society reinforces the injustice of class distinctions and their damaging effects on a soldier's personal sense of masculinity during the First World War. Likewise, the "snobbery" that would be inherent if a soldier didn't fit in by wearing the right "khaki costume" is present. Tommo and Charlie Peaceful's experience onWarfront not only informs readers of the prevalent nature of hierarchy within British culture in the early twentieth century, but Morpurgo also highlights the absurdity of such distinctions; THE pettiness of worry behind what particular shade of khaki someone wears to symbolize this. The value placed on higher ranking officers (both on and off the battlefield) is in direct contrast to the contempt given to soldiers of lower social rank: it shows the "snobbery" within the British social structure which leads to injustice and the suspicious view of soldiers as purely expendable. Thus, both Billy Prior and Thomas Peaceful's personal experiences directly contribute to our understanding of emasculation and the strong presence of class discrimination on the war front. Peter Hitchcock presents the idea that Barker “shifts the scene of Englishness not by attacking what is remembered but by exploring the process of memory itself. Rivers was a careful reader of Freud and believed that the “war neurosis” evident in the officers he treated was not necessarily the result of the war alone. Hitchcock states that, instead, it was "part of an ongoing psychological struggle between an officer's desire to forget the horrors of war and his memory's insistence that these events are actually the substance of what war represents ". hysteria and nightmares immediately indicated as direct after-effects of an already present war; perhaps a solid part of the cultural and social values ​​that existed at that time. I believe this concept is valid for both novels and attributes different meanings to the idea of ​​“regeneration”; particularly Barker's idea that the unrealistic ideals of masculinity that existed before the war were a significant factor in causing breakdowns in so many men. For something to regenerate, it must have already been generated, conditioned and produced; inferring that it was society that prevented widespread neurosis in high-ranking officers, rather than the war itself. Emasculation is a recurring theme in both books. All characters presented, whether generals or low-ranking privates, are afraid of emasculation, whether in the context of the battlefield in Private Peaceful or in the war hospital in Regeneration. For the latter the dilemma can easily be placed on the treatment itself. As patients, men must relinquish all power to the doctors and nurses who care for them. Aside from that, while Rivers is concerned about the effect this lack of control has on his patients, there are also concerns about whether or not the treatment itself is emasculating. The treatment method consists of healing by talking, which is said to go against the “very tenor of their education”. Since Rivers openly acknowledges that they "had been trained to identify emotional repression as the essence of manhood," they may begin to associate themselves with the concept of being doubly emasculated. Interestingly, Prior was encouraged to be as manly as possible in his childhood, he preferred to undergo physical submission such as hypnosis rather than release his feelings in what he considers emotional submission. The trenches are symbolic in Private Peaceful, similarly as they are in much of Wilfred Owen's poetry, both figuratively and literally, to the graves. The trenches (and the death associated with them) are also represented as a sort of allegorical 'savior', for example the way Sergeant Hanley barks orders at the brothers about how they should dig”; .....dig, you lazy beggars, dig, because when you get out there, that's all you can hide in, God's good earth” implies that the act ofdigging as succumbing to the safety of the Earth is worth more as safety than any other measure. It's possible that the message Morpurgo is trying to convey is that death itself is the most peaceful conclusion. By comparison, the trenches are displayed in a much more suffocating and morbid manner in Regeneration. Many of Craiglockhart's patients have terrible memories and experiences of the trenches. Particularly Prior, who has rediscovered a memory of himself waking up in a trench one morning, only to turn around and find two of his comrades killed by an explosive shell. The Prior was forced to mix their remains with lyme to strengthen the walls of the trench; implying that the trenches were simply another place of horror instead of the refuge they were intended to be. Rivers’ thoughts on the trenches also equate to their symbolism as graves: “they had been mobilized into holes in the ground so narrow they could hardly move. And the Great Adventure – the real-life equivalent of all the adventure stories they had devoured as boys – consisted of crouching on a bench, waiting to be killed. This implies that the trenches are what "devours" men; symbolically as vaginas that emasculate soldiers. Another reading of this could be that Barker portraying the trenches as living graves could be showing how soldiers saw death and the trenches alike as an escape from the atrocities they had to endure while still alive. Elaine Showalter points out that the war is “a crisis of masculinity and a test of the Victorian masculine ideal.” It was an intense crisis not only on this front, but in class relations that threw the hierarchies previously established by the Industrial Revolution into complete disarray, but ironically it was the ideal of working-class masculinity that took the greatest toll. Furthermore, Paul Fussell in his “The Great War and Modern Memory” states that “every war is ironic because every war is worse than expected. Every war constitutes a situational irony because its means are so melodramatically disproportionate to its supposed ends.” For example, on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, the English had suffered over 60,000 casualties, and by the end of the war an almost non-existent percentage of their population were men under the age of thirty. Ironically, industrialists would gain financially, while the working classes would be rewarded only with patriotism and the promise of “a land fit for heroes.” The aftereffects of “The Great Adventure” were not just an increased urgency in individuals to prove their masculinity, but an old-fashioned male “adventure” that actually destroyed masculinity entirely. For one thing, soldiers suffering from shell shock were considered effeminate and weak, and the atrocious conditions of the trench shattered pre-war notions of "being a man." Stoic courage could hardly be expected when under fire in the trenches; a powerless state could never conform to the “Victorian ideal.” Following the notion of mutism, it is a symbolic manifestation of the helplessness and helplessness that men feel. In the novel, both Prior and Callan are stricken with mutism after witnessing their own individual horrific events. Interestingly, since Rivers considers mutism to be an effect of not expressing dissent or opinion about any part of one's life, it occurs primarily in regular soldiers, not officers; men totally at the mercy of their commanders. Another way to look at mutism as a lack of communication is that it could be an assertion of power in itself. Through silence.