I'm interested to know what you think about this so do post some comments :)
Tuesday, December 9, 2008
Theme- The war from a civillians point of view
In Regeneration, the only characters who don't have any direct connections with the war are Sarah Lumb, her friends and the parents of the patients at Craiglockhart. Sarah Lumb is the only character who provides a good view of a civillians mind during wartime. On reading the novel, you would have probably found that Sarah Lumb doesn't actually mention anything about the war, which then brings us to the question 'why'. Why doesn't she show any feelings towards the biggest event of that time? I felt that it probably had to do with her job. She worked in a factory that created weapons for the war and so i'm sure that if she did infact have any opinions about the war then it would have deeply affected her and her opinions would have been displayed in the novel. For instance, if she was against the war then she would have probably been devastated because of her job, and if she was for the war, then she would have probably been rather excited about her job. However, she doesn't offer any point of view at all. Even her friends and her mother don't seem to have any kind of views on the topic, which i find rather strange. While trying to think of it from a present day point of view, i find it really odd. I connected this to the present situation of the terrorist attacks in India and when i analysed the entire event I found that it resembled a war scene: soldiers hiding behind cars, coming out only to get killed( this made me think that it might have been similar for soldiers in the trenches), innocent people getting killed, popular "safe" places getting completely destroyed; all of it resembled a war scene. I also know of people who live there and who have lived there and for them, this event was probably the most frightening thing they have experienced so far. If a near-war event could instill such fear in civillians, it's interesting to think that a real war didn't quite seem to have the same effect. Was it because the war had gone on for such a long time that people got used to it? Or was it just that Pat Barker didn't want to focus on that side of things too much?
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5 comments:
Would you say the time when Sarah got lost in the hospital and found the heavily injured soldiers was the moment she showed her attitude and disgust towards the war? I actually think that Sarah is a type of common civilian who got tricked by the propaganda and the reason why she did not show any affection or attitude towards the war was because she did not really understand the severity. As for the example you have given about the terrorist, I think the system works quite differently, terrorists tend to disturb the civilians' lives, rather than to corrupt the government as their main objective (the case in India).
When my pair talked about Sarah we thought that her actual purpose was to represent the blindness of war. We do not think she was affected by propaganda because this way she may have choosen sides and hated German's. However, we have no clear evidence of her showing hateful emotions towards the Germans.
In fact, Sarah tends to ignore the war all together, this can be shown by Prior. Once he told her he was shell shocked, she did not care. This shows that she accepts people who are in war and have been affected, therefore could show she has nutral feelings towards the war.
Sarah in this case would show a civilian who is possibly more unaware of war then most other civilians who sit back and curse at the germans.
Interesting comments from both Yung and Rhys. You can say that Sarah Lumb's character is symbolic of the attitudes held by civilians in that they really did not comprehend the realities. Rather, she only has the capacity to see the perceived realities presented in her every day life.
It also highlights the irony of how most soldiers realise that the enemy soldiers are not actually their enemies but that they have been encouraged and in some cases forced by their governments to fight a battle in which they are the sorry victims. It is civilian Sarah Lumb (who experiences the least) that hates them the most.
thankyou
That point mainly leads all back to Dung's point about Propaganda.
In response to what Yung said in the beginning: Sarah's opinion on the war does change when she sees all the wounded soldiers in the hospital. But that just shows that she needed strong evidence to finally believe that war caused all of that. As Rhys said, when Prior told her that he was shell shocked, she doesn't really care, but when she sees a hospital full of people she does. I was curious to know why it took so long for her to actually show some feelings.
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