Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Regeneration, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Masculinity, Expectations, and Psychological Health
War, Duty, and Loyalty
Male Relationships
Trauma and Mental Illness
Alienation vs. Belonging
Summary
Analysis
Late at night, Sarah unlocks her window and Prior climbs in. They have the entire night to spend together, but can’t speak much for fear of Sarah’s landlady. They stand and look at each other, still shy at what they are about to do. “In all their weeks of love-making, they’d never once been able to undress,” to be naked with each other. They lay together on Sarah’s bed, still clothed, and Sarah quietly tells him she is glad he’s not going back.
Again, nakedness works as a symbol for vulnerability an intimacy. Sarah and Prior’s inability to be naked with each other, even during sex, suggests that they still struggle to be vulnerable before each other, and particularly that Prior is still not bold enough to lower his mental defenses completely and let Sarah see the pain he’s experienced.
Themes
Prior’s mind flashes to an image of the trench, the eyeball in his palm, and Prior is caught between his impulse not to tell Sarah anything about the war so he can take shelter in her ignorance, and the desire “to know and be known as deeply as possible.” Sarah starts undressing him, though gets tangled trying to unlace his leg wraps, and after both laughing at it, Prior says that he loves Sarah, and she responds in kind.
Sarah becomes a safe haven for Prior, a place to belong amidst the civilian world. It is significant that Sarah begins to undress Prior and expose his nakedness—in the past, he’s always been the one to initiate—which signals that she is proactively trying to see, know, and understand him though he playfully resists. It’s also noteworthy that she gets stuck in the uniform’s laces, suggesting that though she is working to lay him bare, to share the intimacy of knowing his pain, his persona of being a soldier and a stoic impedes her progress, though it certainly will not forever.
Themes
Owen and Sassoon meet together in the Conservative Club one last time before Owen ships out. They spend the evening chatting and looking at poetry. Owen has a bit much to drink and is “afraid of becoming too serious.” Sassoon reveals that Rivers put in a word for him, and he’ll have another board in a month’s time, rather than be locked away. He also gives Owen a letter of introduction for Robert Ross. When the evening draws to a close, Sassoon is the first to leave. Standing and facing each other, neither man can think of what to say, so Sassoon merely pats Owen on the shoulder and disappears. Owen feels rather remiss at such a weak parting, and sits back down in the club. “He was afraid to measure his sense of loss.”
Owen’s fear of being drunk and accidentally becoming too serious suggests that he has feelings for Sassoon that go beyond friendship, but feels unable to express them because of society’s severe aversion to anything close to romantic love between men. Although Sassoon once embraced Graves, when he parts with Owen, neither man knows how to act and so he pats him on the shoulder and leaves. This seems a very underwhelming way for two friends to part, demonstrating the constraining nature of society’s aversion to affection between men, even in mere friendships.
Themes
