“Regeneration Trilogy” by Pat Barker (post 4): Book One ends with the war hero/anti-war poet headed back to war. Book Two’s epigraph cites “duality of man”

The first book of this trilogy has the psychotherapeutic relationship between Dr. Rivers and Siegfried Sassoon as its main focus. Rivers closes his file on Sassoon, and the first book, with “Nov. 26, 1917. Discharged to duty.” Sassoon, who is both a gung-ho war hero and an anti-war poet, will return to battle at his own request.

“How on earth was Siegfried going to manage in France? His opposition to the war had not changed. If anything it had hardened. And to go back to fight, believing as he did, would be to encounter internal divisions far deeper than anything he’d experienced before” (1, p. 219).

The second book of the trilogy begins with an epigraph on the “duality of man” from The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

Thus, as the above and previous posts suggest, there will likely be overt multiple personality in the second and/or third books of this trilogy. Whether it will be acknowledged and labelled as multiple personality, or glossed over as the “duality of man,” I don’t know.

Dr. Rivers has not, so far, had any thoughts of, or shown any knowledge of, multiple personality. Although amnesia is one of the common symptoms he sees in his patients with “shell shock” (posttraumatic stress disorder, PTSD), he has not pursued this symptom as a possible clue to multiple personality (search “memory gaps”), which is the way most cases of multiple personality are diagnosed.

So when multiple personality is seen later in this trilogy, it will likely become overt, not due to intentional, diagnostic evaluation for it, but in a crisis and of its own accord. And since, in a person who has lifelong multiple personality, it becomes recognizably overt of its own accord (by, for example, acknowledging a different name) only on rare occasions, it is often mistaken for a transient event. But this author should not make that mistake, because, as quoted in a previous post, she based the multiple personality symptoms of one of her characters on a real-life case of an adult who had multiple personality since childhood.

1. Pat Barker. The Regeneration Trilogy: Regeneration [1991], The Eye in the Door [1993], The Ghost Road [1995]. London, Viking/Penguin, 1996.