by Alice George

Created on: August 12, 2009

Though Pat Barker and Wilfred Owen were writing at different times in different forms and from different viewpoints they are both concerned with putting across what they feel to be a truthful account of the damage the First World War did to the minds and bodies of a generation of young men. Wilfred Owen as a young man who actually took part in the action is able to draw on his own experiences, and so he was able to inject his poetry with the full horror of what he had witnessed making it some of the most brutally poignant in the English language. Pat Barker is a female author who, like her main character Rivers and her audience, never took part in the war. She has felt some of its impact as the grandfather who raised her fought in World War I and her meticulous research has given her an insight that allows her to open up some of the world of Craiglockhart for us. In choosing Rivers as her central character she can take us into the era of the First World War without writing what she terms a 'pseudo combatant novel', by choosing Rivers, someone who knows a great deal about the war and is dealing everyday with its effects, as her central character she creates a novel that deals brilliantly with the effects of the war, the attitudes of the men and also provides herself with a historical structure around which to build the novel.

The relationship between the two works is made more complex by the fact that Wilfred Owen appears in Craiglockhart suffering with war neurosis and that Pat Barker was certainly aware of his poetry and may have drawn down on it as a source for her novel. The scene in which Rivers gazes at a stained glass window of Abraham and Isaac certainly forms a strong parallel with 'The parable of the old man and the young'. The idea of the father sacrificing his son provides a grotesque metaphor for the slaughter on the fields of France, in Owen's case he is also using his poem to vent the anger he felt towards the older generation who are too proud to halt the carnage, the scene with Rivers is at the point in the novel where his attitude to the war has changed and the window echoes the horror he is beginning to feel at the pointless loss of life. It also illustrates the isolation of the young men from the rest of society, they are living in hell whilst 'old men, and woman of all ages, gathered together and sang hymns. The hymn 'God moves in a mysterious way' provides a parallel for Sassoon's poem 'They' '-And the Bishop said: 'The ways of God are

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