Examine and compare the ways in which Pat Barker in Regeneration and Es

Examine and compare the ways in which Pat Barker in Regeneration andWilfred Owen in his poetry explore the nature of life in the trenches.Pat Barker and Wilfred Owen are both successful writers in deliveringan insight into trench life from the perspective of a soldier,although in different ways. Owen, being a soldier himself, has hadfirst hand experience of trench life and describes the pity of war, inthat war is a waste of young, innocent lives, and the bitterness ofthe soldiers towards the people who do not have to fight. WhereasBarker recreates trench life through the nightmares, hallucinationsand memories of the soldiers. Despite the fact that Barker is a modernwoman writer she thus far manages to write a realistic view of theeffects of war on soldiers. We forget that she would have had to doextensive research to get her information so detailed, in particular asshe combines real characters such as Graves and Sassoon, with herfictional creations. There are several themes explor ed in the work ofboth writers, the force of nature and the dangers in the trenches,explored in Exposure. The hatred and bitterness towards shirkersexplored in The Dead Beat. The torment and terrible conditions thatthe soldiers had to put up with, in Dulce Et Decorum Est, and howthe soldiers began to speak up that it would be easier to end their livesin war than to live through another day of horror, explored inAterre.The title Exposure says enough about the dangers in the trenches,the risk of death and exposure to the confrontation and exposure the naturalelements. Owen describes the intensity of the merciless iced eastwinds that cut through the soldiers like a knife. Creating a viciousimagery of trench c... ...his poem barmy with All Regrets Owen describes how here in thiscoffin of a bed, his regret is that after so much time being trappedin the trenches with so much time to just sit and think, it is onlynow that he appreciates life and how important it is. The comparisonwith R egeneration is that Prior, Sassoon and the others are stilltrapped and still have hours to think of what it is they have and aremissing by being locked up in Craiglockhart.The work of both Barker and Owen captures the realism of what thesesoldiers in reality went through, without actually trying to sugarcoatit for the audience back at home. We are able to understand a littlebetter why the soldiers got so close in war and why they hated thecivilians so much. I can say that after reading Regeneration andWilfred Owens work I will never think about war in the same way again.