“Regeneration Trilogy” by Booker Prize winner Pat Barker: Author says divided state of Billy Prior is based on Vietnam War veteran with multiple personality.

Regeneration Trilogy

“Regeneration is a historical…novel by Pat Barker, first published in 1991… It is the first of three novels in the Regeneration Trilogy of novels on the First World War, the other two being The Eye in the Door and The Ghost Road which won the Booker Prize in 1995…

“The novel explores the experience of British army officers being treated for shell shock during World War I…Barker draws extensively on first person narratives from the period. Using these sources, she created characters based on historical individuals…including poets and patients, Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, and psychiatrist W. H. R. Rivers, who pioneered treatments of posttraumatic stress disorder during and after World War I…Barker also includes fictional characters…including…Billy Prior…” (1)

“Prior…is an intelligent, deeply cynical soldier whom we first meet recovering from shell shock...At the beginning of Regeneration he is temporarily mute, having found the detached eye of a dead comrade in the trenches, and mainly communicates through writing with pen and paper. However, he eventually overcomes this through counselling with Dr. W. H. R. Rivers, the historical psychologist who features prominently in all three novels. His relationship with Rivers is problematic and sometimes argumentative. During the trilogy they are at odds over class difference (Billy comes from working class origins), Prior's sardonic treatment of the hospital staff, and Rivers's own moral misgivings about the war…In the first novel of the series we learn that Prior was emotionally abused by his father, an abrasive wife-beater, an experience that also helped shape the man he would become. Nahem Yousaf and Sharon Monteith called Prior ‘the mobilizing force in the trilogy; not only does he experience the war in phases, his chameleonlike character also facilitates shifts in perspective.’ ” (2).

Based on Real-Life Multiple Personality

Pat Barker says, “The extreme divided state Prior experiences in The Eye in the Door is actually based on a Vietnam War veteran, who, in the other state, the alternative personality, had very striking anesthesia over a very large part of his body…And that state went back into his childhood. He was black, and he’d been attacked in his neighborhood by a gang of white youths, all of whom were much bigger than he was, and there was no way he was going to win or survive without a beating. This other personality came and took over and took the pain. Ever since then, but particularly in Vietnam, when he was frightened or in danger or faced with physical pain, he would go into this other state, which was extremely violent” (3, p. 184).

1. Wikipedia. “Regeneration (novel).” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regeneration_(novel)

2. Wikipedia. “Billy Prior.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Prior

3. Sheryl Stevenson. “With the Listener In Mind: Talking about the Regeneration Trilogy with Pat Barker,” pp. 175-184, in Critical Perspectives on Pat Barker, Edited by Sharon Monteith, Margaretta Jolly, Nahem Yousaf, Ronald Paul. University of South Carolina Press, 2005.