Metalanguage
The genre of this novel
What is historical fiction?
Sassoon’s rejection of military honour.
Sassoon throwing his Military Cross ribbon in the Mersey
Prior’s memories of the front, recovered under hypnosis.
What is flashback?
The Edinburgh hospital where Rivers works.
What is Craiglockhart?
They looked like machines, whose sole function was to make other machines
Sarah
A central idea explored, such as masculinity.
What is a theme?
Burns being unable to “stomach” the horror of war.
What does Burns’ inability to eat symbolise?
Burns landing face-first in a rotting corpse.
What is visceral imagery?
The WWI term for combat trauma.
What is shell shock?
Perceives men’s involvement in the war as ‘the club of all clubs’
Prior
Prior is Sassoon's ____ , highlighting class difference.
What is a foil?
The army silencing broken soldiers.
What does Yealland’s treatment of Callan symbolise?
A healer whose success sends men back to war.
What is irony?
The poet Sassoon mentors at Craiglockhart.
Who is Wilfred Owen?
"You can’t [say] you want to be wounded, because officers aren’t supposed to think that.”
Burns
Rivers’s talking cure versus Yealland’s shock treatment.
What is juxtaposition?
War’s damage reaching women at home.
What does the munitions workers’ yellow skin symbolise?
Opening with Sassoon’s real Declaration.
What is intertextuality?
Rivers’s Freud-influenced treatment.
What is the talking cure?
"I just don’t like the idea of making it out to be less of a horror than it really is.”
Sassoon
The character whose perspective a scene is filtered through.
What is perspective?
Rivers’s own repressed emotion.
What does Rivers’s stammer symbolise?
Prior’s speech revealing his working-class background.
What is characterisation through dialogue?
Rivers links mutism in privates and nightmares in officers to this.
What is social class?
"Remember - you must behave as ... the hero I expect you to be."
Yealland