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
That evening, Rivers tries to write a paper but cannot; images from the afternoon’s treatment swirl through his mind like hallucinations. He sits in his armchair, feeling very ill, and then steps out for a walk until the late evening, which does him some good. However, as soon as Rivers falls asleep that night, he has a vivid dream of walking through the National Hospital. He sees the man with the deformed back, who starts speaking Sassoon’s anti-war declaration. The dream changes, and Rivers is in the operating room, trying to force an electrode into a patient’s mouth. When it won’t fit, he realizes that the electrode is actually a horse’s bit. Rivers wakes, but the images remain in his vision for a long time before he manages to calm himself.
Once again, Rivers’s near-hallucinations suggest that he is heading towards his own mental breakdown or at least experiencing the early symptoms of neurosis. Even Rivers’s dream resembles a nightmare, meaning that he suffers the exact same symptoms of trauma and stress as Sassoon, and if he were a soldier rather than a doctor, he could just as easily find himself as a patient in a psychiatric hospital. Rivers’s own repression of feelings and symptoms that arguably need medical treatment is both tragic and ironic.
Themes
Rivers sets about analyzing the dream, which feels pointedly self-accusatory. The deformed man seems to him to represent Sassoon and his declaration, but he wonders about the patient in the chair. When he realizes that a bridle and bit are instruments of control, however, it begins to come together. In his treatment, Rivers is exerting control over individual lives, reforming them back into soldiers. Although psychiatric treatment is meant to stop self-destructive behavior, nothing could be more self-destructive and even suicidal then returning to war. For both Callan and Prior, their mutism is thus a form of psychological protest, and by taking that away from them, Rivers silenced their protest just as he managed to silence Sassoon’s anti-war protest. The dream is mainly guilt about Sassoon then. Although he tries to tell himself that Sassoon is making his own choice, the thought is haunting.
Again the bit functions as a symbol of the control Rivers tacitly exerts by coaxing soldiers’ broken minds back to a functioning level so they can return to combat to fight again. This is a thematically critical moment in the novel’s portrayal of mental illness and its treatment, suggesting that if mental breakdown is the mind’s natural reaction to overwhelming stress and trauma, then a psychiatrist actually does a disservice by undoing those symptoms without changing the environment that produced them. Fixing a soldier’s mind and then sending him straight back to combat seems only to be muting his mind’s power to protest the horror and unsustainability of war.
Themes
