The Dialogism In Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy

Pat Barker,the remarkable contemporary British writer,published her first novel United Street in 1983.Since then,13 novels have been published,and her most representative work is Regeneration Trilogy,including Regeneration,The Eye in the Door,and The Ghost Road.The Regeneration Trilogy,written in the realistic style,based on the historical event during First World War,has long been held a classic of English literature.Written in the 1990 s,the Regeneration Trilogy has captured the attention of reading public as well as scholarly.For instance,The Eye in the Door got the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1993,and The Ghost Road won the Book Prize in 1995.Barker rewrites the past and creates a dialogue with history.Therefore,the trilogy is considered to be highly dialogic,allowing lots of voices to be heard.Barker illustrates not only the history of Great War,but also the modern questions reflect in the past.Barker’s trilogy deals with a number of complex and profound modern issues:trauma,psychology,gender,class,patriarchy,colonization...These subjects are interspersed with antagonistic relationships between rationality and madness,doctor and patient,male and female,upper class and working class,father and son,civilization and barbarism.In the discourse of war,those relationships has changed,the boundaries began to blur,even to transform.The unambiguous concepts and distinctions have been shattered by war and need to be rethought and repositioned.In this condition,the concept of dialogism,which is the most important artistic feature in Regeneration Trilogy has been drawn on.Dialogism is the narrative relationship that can be seen everywhere in the novels.The voice of the author and the voice of the characters in the novels form the colorful narrative discourse in the trilogy.This paper offers a study of dialogism narrative in Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy,consists of three chapters,along with introduction and conclusion.The introductory section firstly introduces the current status of Pat Barker’s research abroad and in China,followed by the inspiration for Barker’s creation of Regeneration Trilogy,and points out the ideological background of the dialogism of Barker’s works.After that,Bakhtin’s theory of dialogue is briefly introduced,and the purpose,method and significance of this paper’s research are explained.The first chapter demonstrates the dialogical relationship between the characters of the trilogy.The trilogy features soldiers as the main characters,in this case,dialogism could means that dialogue toward the internal self and dialogue toward the external others.In addition,this chapter will explore the gender contradictions and psychological trauma caused by war,as well as the relationship between silence and speech included in the treatment of trauma.The second chapter focuses on the dialogic between trilogy and history.The Regeneration Trilogy is structured with two parallel story lines of the main characters,Rivers and Prior.Rivers is both a psychiatrist at the Imperial Hospital and an anthropologist on the Melanesian Islands;for Prior,he is both a military officer who is among the upper class and a street boy who cannot escape his lower-class origins.This chapter will analyze the dialogical nature between the trilogy and history.Through multiple story lines,the novel’s characters engage with all levels of society,fully demonstrating the complexity of the novel’s voice.The trilogy intertwines fiction and truth,making history a text in dialogue with fiction.The third chapter focuses on exploring the intertextual style with other texts embodied in the Regeneration Trilogy.Barker attempts to incorporate her own voice into the collective memory of Great War by quoting and rewriting classic texts to enrich the dialogical nature of the text.The concluding section of the paper notes that Barker raises contemporary issues in the context of Great War.In contrast to the grand-history presented by traditional war narratives,the combination of history and fiction in the Regeneration Trilogy is highly dialogic,a dialog that bridges those voices on the margins of history and allows the text to generate not only an internal dialogue,but also a dialogue with history.