How does Barker present the supernatural and the haunting return of the dead in Regeneration?

Set within the clinical walls of Craiglockhart War Hospital in 1917, Pat Barker's 1991 historical novel Regeneration examines how the dead of the First World War refuse to remain buried, returning to haunt the men who survived them. While the war's official rhetoric treats death as an honourable sacrifice, Barker insists that the slaughtered keep returning to the lives of the living. Finally the author presents haunting as the war's deepest psychological wound, arguing that the conflict turns its survivors into ghosts long before it kills them.¹

Through making the dead return physically to the living, Barker ensures that the casualties of conflict refuse to stay buried.² When Sassoon awakes to find the apparition of his dead friend Orme "standing just inside the door³", a figure content merely to "just look puzzled", Barker's Gothic imagery literalises the supernatural⁴, refusing the survivor the consolation of a closed grave. The detail that Sassoon "recognised his coat" converts the ghost from an object of horror into a familiar companion, recognition itself binding the survivor to the man he could not save⁵. Through this spectral visitation, Barker insists that industrial slaughter follows the living home rather than ending at the trenches, the dead demanding their place in the survivor's waking hours rather than remaining confined to the battlefield.⁶ Expanding past this solitary phantom, Barker explores a broader haunting among men denied the closure of witnessing a soldier's orderly death. Advancing into the repressed memory recovered under Rivers's hypnosis, Barker has Prior relive shovelling "splinters of blackened bone⁷" into a bag and closing his fingers around a "severed eye", the unburied dead thereby taking a physical grip upon the living. His "shaking wrist" records a body that has touched mass death and can no longer release it, the visceral imagery locating the horror in the nerves rather than the conscious mind. The trauma lodges itself beneath language, stored in tissue and reflex where no act of will can reach it. Through such embodied contact, Barker implies how the dead are never truly gone, merely waiting in the muscle and the memory for any moment of recall to summon them back.⁸ By establishing the dead as a persistent living presence, Barker demonstrates how they dominate the minds of the survivors, creating a fixation that internalised guilt and collective loyalty only exacerbate.