Regeneration (Pat Barker) Sassoon/Rivers Character Analysis

3 Pages 651 Words

Look again at Rivers and Sassoon’s first meeting. What do we learn about Rivers and his methods, and Sassoon’s state of mind?

Right from when these two characters meet, we see their personalities and their way of thinking shine through. Sassoon is very cautious of what he says, although after getting to know Rivers a bit, expresses his more personal thoughts. Rivers immediately analyses and assesses Sassoon from the very first paragraph in their meeting. Sassoon’s “pale skin, purple shadows under the eyes show “no obvious signs of nervous disorder” in Sassoon, but this immediately shows us, the reader, how Rivers is going to conduct his first interview with.
Rivers has a very friendly attitude towards Sassoon, smiling at him when he takes his first sip of tea. This is because Rivers wants Sassoon to feel relaxed and open so he will express his innermost feelings, and therefore he can pin-point Sassoon’s cause of “neurosis”. Sassoon is surprised by River’s approach and begins to see him as an individual rather than ‘the doctor’. For River’s this allows personal views into consultation and Sassoon expresses his actual “hate” of civilians when they discuss his ‘after-dream hallucinations’. The hallucinations that Sassoon has been having and the nightmares he had of war scenes, shows how he has obviously been affected by the war.
However even though we see Sassoon’s effects from his time at the front line, he shows his sanity right from the start. He jokes sarcastically about what if “the lunatic” (himself) went missing. He has been put in Craiglockhart as a mentally ill patient, but this was only because his friend Graves, didn’t want to see Sassoon get killed for his declaration. The declaration “had to be done” according to Sassoon, although both him and Rivers knew fighting a one man war against how the ‘great war’ was being fort was “futile”. Both characters know Sassoon isn...