Burns

Introduction

Space, setting, the interaction between landscape and mindscape and the curious similarities between outdoors places in Scotland and the landscape of the Flanders correspond to the writer’s intention of similarity: the characters are so obsessed by the war that they see it in Scotland.

This obsession ultimately transforms their vision of time.

The present is the past

Indeed, the characters have no present. It applies to all traumatized soldiers:

• conscious: remembering.
• unconscious: hallucination

For instance, Sassoon had hallucinations (p.12): “the pavement was covered in corpses“. Then he says he had no more: the reader can doubt it:

• p.5: “he saw lines of men“.
• p.142: “with a crack like rifle fire“.

The same happens to Burns: (p.37): “a branch rattled like machine gun fire“.
And to Prior:

• p.214: “the darkness, the nervousness, the repeated and unnecessary swallowing…“
• p.215: “at this distance, her eyes merged into a single eye“.He remembers the eye he held in the trenches.Love scene turned into a horror scene.

No future

If the past keeps coming back then there is no future.

• p.118: Rivers’s analysis of Sassoon: “inability to envisage any kind of future“.
• p.198: “it means you’re obsessed […] you never talk about the future anymore“.

A subjective vision of time

Read passage p.83-84 : conversation between Owens and Sassoon about the war.

Personal time

Interesting passage: 2 people in a hospital talking about their past experience. You would expect present tense to refer to the moment of enunciation and past tenses to refer to the war but here, present tenses are used to refer to the past:

• “sometimes when you’re alone“.
• “and that makes it something you almost can’t challenge“.
• “what you see every night“.

When the present is used, “you” is used too. Both tense and pronoun have the effect of generalizing their experience so that their personal experience of the war is turned into a universal experience. What happened to them becomes exemplary.

B. Historical time

Generalization has the effect of blurring WW1 as an historical event and of presenting it as an a-historical event.

Owen:

• “you get sense of something ancient“.Owen takes the war out of the contemporary period.
• “men from Marlborough’s army“.He compares WW1 to very distant events in the past.
• “wars distilled themselves into that war“.Owen shows the similarities of all wars. World War One is the model, the paradigm of all wars.

Sassoon refers to the future. The result is the same: war loses its temporal and historical quality.

• “I seemed to be seeing it from the future”.If he is in the future, then war represents the past.

War loses its historical quality. The common point is that war becomes a sort of symbolic representation of Time.

Time is movement but for them, time is eternal death.

Study of a passage p.37-38: “he got off at the next stop […] whine of shells“.

This passage is not a dialogue. The narrator is telling us about Burns. Presence of realistic elements: stress on concrete details (“a tuft of grey wool“). Use of chronological order + realistic framework.

Everything is seen through Burns’s subjectivity: he is the central focalizer and we move from an objective description of landscape to a subjective mindscape.

Presence of subjectivity

Focalization

Burns is the focalizer (internal focalization): “looking up and down“. Burns does not only look, he feels trough his skin: “raindrops”, “burning round the knees”.

He also hears the pigeon.

Narration

Passage characterized with 3rd person narration. From time to time, the voice of the character emerges:

• “it was so long since he’d been anywhere alone”.
• “up, up”.

Burns is talking. The main effect is to reduce the distance between the reader and the character.

The impossible escape

Burns has left the hospital in an impulse. He does not know where he wants to go. His mental state is extremely fragile and even the traffic is too much for him. He favours a solitary place: “a hill”. Desire for escape:

• out of hospital.
• away from human beings.

The hill: a savage and desolate place. The stress is on the upward movement:

• “up, up”
• repetition of “hill”
• “climbing”
• “crest”

When there is an insistence on something in the text, it may have a symbolic meaning.

• upward movement: usually trying to find a better world.
• quite consistent with his desire to get away from human beings.
• it is unconscious.

The problem is that he goes up but he is stopped: “way barred by a force”. His progression is hindered and he becomes a prisoner of Nature. Intention to move on: “he pressed two strands of wire apart” but failure: “catching his sleeve”. Then panic: “breaking into a sweat”. Burns tries to protect himself: “steeple of his cupped hands”.

There are 2 symbolic meanings:

• protecting his breath,
• steeple: symbol of the church.
  => he ought to take shelter.

An aggressive nature

3 elements out of 4 are present in the text:

• Air: wind
• Earth: mud
• Water: rain

The 4 elements are necessary to life but here rain aggresses Burns and blinds him. No freedom. Air: high wind and maline intention (evil wind). “Snatching away” : the wind is trying to kill him.

The landscape of Scotland becomes the landscape of Flanders. Burns mistakes a place for another (confusion) and a moment for another: there is no present for Burns since what he lives is the war.

That is the way Pat Barker chose to express Burns’ trauma.

A hostile nature

Use of an adjective of color (yellow)

The sun and the light are described as yellow, which is a warm color not normally applied to natural light.

• p.175, l.2: “fading to yellow“. Yellow not presented as a bright color, paradox.
• p.128: “yellowing of the light“, “sulfurous“. Attribute of Lucifer, negative connotation.
• p.199: “like an artificial sunset“.The natural light of the sun has gone. Yellow is linked to the war.

Yellow is associated with light, with Sarah’s skin (because of the ammo factory). It has a negative connotation. This is a subversion of nature. The sun is expected to give light. Here it is the ammo factory that gives light.

Light is the symbol of life whereas war is related to death: there is a subversion of the normal use of life and light.

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