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Is The Great Gatsby a love story? The new Baz Luhrmann adaptation is being sold as such. Starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan and boasting a haunting love theme from Lana Del Ray, the film is a "great, tragic love story with action, passion, drama", said director Baz Luhrmann to the Hollywood Reporter, comparing his the casting of Daisy to the search for Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind. The romance novelist Barbara Taylor Bradford proclaimed the novel to be "the greatest love story ever told". Gatsby can certainly sold that way - but can it be told that way?

Is The Great Gatsby a love story? The new Baz Luhrmann adaptation is being sold as such. Starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan and boasting a haunting love theme from Lana Del Ray, the film is a "great, tragic love story with action, passion, drama", said director Baz Luhrmann to the Hollywood Reporter, comparing his the casting of Daisy to the search for Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind. The romance novelist Barbara Taylor Bradford proclaimed the novel to be "the greatest love story ever told". Gatsby can certainly sold that way - but can it be told that way?

Reading on mobile? Watch The Great Gatsby trailer here
For those in need of a refresher, here's a quick recap of the plot: drawn to New York by his new job in the bond business, Nick Carraway moves to Long Island, where his neighbor Gatsby holds lavish parties in the hopes of winning back Nick's cousin, Daisy, a beautiful debutante with whom he had a romance before the Great War. Nick agrees to have both Gatsby and Daisy to tea. Daisy and Gatsby soon rekindle their affair, but upon being pressured to renounce her husband, she retreats from both men. Tragedy intervenes. The problem with this as a love story, as many readers have pointed out and Fitzgerald himself knew, is Daisy herself. Is she ever in love with Gatsby? As Fitzgerald wrote to his editor, Max Perkins:

The worst fault in it is a big fault; I gave no account (and had no feeling or knowledge of) the emotional relations between Daisy and Gatsby from the time of their reunion to the catastrophe. However the lack is so astutely covered by the retrospect of Gatsby past and by blankets of excellent prose that nobody has noticed.

Throughout the book, Daisy is characterized mostly through her voice, which is described as a "low thrilling voice" possessed of a "fluctuating, feverish warmth" and an "exhilarating ripple". But in the book's climactic scene, at the Plaza hotel, she refused to come into focus. "I can't quite place Daisy reaction" confessed Fitzgerald, apologizing that the book's secondary women characters - Jordan Baker, Myrtle - were far stronger. "It's a man's book," he concluded.
The reason for the blur is partly temperamental - Daisy is a projection of male desires, a coquettish mirage, a collection of great one-liners - but it is also a matter of narrative expedience.

If Daisy were to be investigated in any great depth, the reader would learn too early the particulars of her and Gatsby's "romance". These are saved for the end of the book, when we learn that Gatsby, originating from a penniless Midwestern family, had courted Daisy in the hopes of marrying her, letting her "believe that he was a person from the same stratum as herself". He was subsequently sent to fight in the war and Daisy, under pressure to marry someone rich soon, married Tom Buchanan instead. The reason? "She must have her life shaped now, immediately - and the decision must be made with some force - of love, money, of unquestionable practicality - that was close at hand." And so she breaks it off: "The letter reached him while he was still at Oxford."
This bombshell had its roots in Fitzgerald's own life: namely his courtship of Zelda Sayre in 1918, and the end of their affair a year later when she sent him packing, worried about marrying an unpublished writer with no money. According to Matthew Bruccoli's biography, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, they quarelled bitterly about her hurtful lack of faith in his future - a double blow that Fitzgerald took very much to heart, expiating his anguish in a series of stories - Winter Dreams, The Sensible Thing and finally The Great Gatsby - in which rich girls refuse to marry poor boys, and the boys go off and make a pot of money to win them back. He eventually did the same with Zelda, reuniting with her after the publication of This Side of Paradise and decamping to the French Riviera, where he finished Gatsby and she plunged directly into an affair with a French aviator named Edouard Joan. "That September, 1924, I knew something had happened that could never be repaired," wrote Fitzgerald.
The Great Gatsby grew out of that profound disenchantment with his own romantic ardor: his success had not bought him the love of the woman it was designed to win back. And this, it turns out, after much moonlit prose, is the theme of The Great Gatsby. The Daisy we encounter in the book's final pages is an entirely different creature than the enchanted creature we first met, now "gleaming like silver, safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor", her voice sounding, as Carraway realizes with a jolt, "like money". Once enchanted, he is now repelled, "for Daisy was young and her artificial world was redolent of orchids and pleasant cheerful snobbery". From one angle, then, the book is a study in romantic delusion. Gatsby has fallen for the wrong girl, as Fitzgerald had. That is the "tragedy". This is bad news for Hollywood, which likes its love pure, or if not pure then thwarted by some obstacle other than pleasant snobbery. The Robert Redford version of 1974 got around it with montages: picnics, tennis whites, the lens so smeared with Vaseline you wondered how the operator had secured it to the camera without injury. The script was by Francis Ford Coppola, who advised Luhrmann to go digging into the secondary texts as a way to break open the book. So Lurhmann looked up Trimalchio, Fitzgerald's earliest version of The Great Gatsby, and also the letters Fitzgerald exchanged with Ginevra King, the 16-year-old Chicago debutante with whom he first fell in love - a more innocent creature than Zelda who supplies Mulligan with some of her best lines in the film, including "I wish I had done everything in my life with you", which she whispers into Gatsby's ear in the trailer. Lurhmann has also rerouted that break-up letter, now going not from Daisy to Gatsby but Gatsby to Daisy. He breaks it off, not her. But then, alongside this rejuvenated, victimized Daisy, we have the jaded party girl who pushes off Di Caprio when he comes on too heavy: "Remember the way we used to have fun? Can't it be like that again?"

Will the real Daisy please stand up? Which Daisy will register most strongly with audiences? We'll find out on Friday.
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Baz Luhrmann says The Great Gatsby is a love story. Is he right? | Tom Shone

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Is The Great Gatsby a love story? The new Baz Luhrmann adaptation is being sold as such. Starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan and boasting a haunting love theme from Lana Del Ray, the film is a "great, tragic love story with action, passion, drama", said director Baz Luhrmann to the Hollywood Reporter, comparing his the casting of Daisy to the search for Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind.

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'The Serious Superficiality of The Great Gatsby' (New Yorker)

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'The Serious Superficiality of The Great Gatsby' (New Yorker)

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Baz Luhrmann's "The Great Gatsby" is lurid, shallow, glamorous, trashy, tasteless, seductive, sentimental, aloof, and artificial. It's an excellent adaptation, in other words, of F. Scott Fitzgerald's melodramatic American classic. Luhrmann, as expected, has turned "Gatsby" into a theme-park ride. But he's done it in exactly the right way. He hasn't tried to make the novel more respectable, intellectual, or realistic. Instead, he's taken "The Great Gatsby" very seriously just as it is.

"Gatsby" is hard to pin down. On the one hand, it's broadly understood as a classic American novel, which suggests that it must have important things to say about the twenties, money, love, and the American dream. On the other, it seems self-evidently to be about style over substance. It's short (only a hundred and fifty pages); its plot is absurd; and it examines only the thinnest wedge of American life. It was poorly received when it was published (H. L. Mencken thought it was "no more than a glorified anecdote"), and it continues to be an object of skepticism (Kathryn Schulz, in last week's New York, writes that "Gatsby" is "aesthetically overrated, psychologically vacant, and morally complacent"). In 1950, in "The Liberal Imagination," Lionel Trilling predicted that Gatsby's story would lose its magnetism: Gatsby, Trilling wrote, represented the fantasy of "personal ambition and heroism, of life committed to, or thrown away for, some ideal of self," while modern society urges young people to find "distinction through cooperation, subordination, and an expressed piety of social usefulness." ("The Great Zuckerberg" doesn't have quite the same ring to it.) And yet, all the while, "Gatsby" has grown more beloved and resonant. Today the novel, like Gatsby himself, seems suspicious.

A lot of the confusion stems from the fact that "Gatsby" isn't like other great American books. It's not a social novel, like "Sister Carrie," or a novel of manners, like "The House of Mirth," or a novel about our national destiny, like "American Pastoral." "Gatsby" is weirder than all those books; it's more like Sherwood Anderson's "Winesburg, Ohio." It's about a spiritual atmosphere, and about the inner life that gives rise to that atmosphere. It's popular because we still live in that atmosphere today. Fitzgerald's novel is cool, sexy, stylized, and abstract; there's a dreamlike falseness, a hollowness, an unreality to it, and that apparent superficiality is part of what makes it fascinating. It's modernist and European without being arty. The best moments in the novel have the devious, carnal sophistication of high fashion; the characters seem unreal, but are also unforgettable. And, for all its strangeness, it also possesses a glamorous, crowd-pleasing commercialism.

What's most appealing about "Gatsby" might be its mood of witty hopelessness, of vivacious self-destructiveness. When Daisy says, of her daughter, "I hope she'll be a fool-that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool," you can't help but be drawn in. Perhaps she's right: look around, and you can easily see the advantages of being rich, attractive, and ignorant. Even if she isn't right, Daisy's attitude strikes a chord. This atmosphere of casual, defiant, disillusioned cool is the novel's unique contribution to literature. It's the reason the novel's endured. And it's to this side of the novel that Luhrmann is attracted: the seductive side.

Fitzgerald understood the pleasures of giving in, and he saw people as desperate to give in to nearly anything-a drink, a person, a story, a feeling, a song, a crowd, an idea. We were especially willing, he thought, to give in to ideas-to fantasies. "Gatsby" captures, with great vividness, the push and pull of illusion and self-delusion; the danger and thrill of forgetting, lying, and fantasizing; the hazards and the indispensability of dreaming and idealization. We often declare our independence, Fitzgerald thought, by declaring our allegiance to a cause that makes what Trilling called a "large, strict, personal demand upon life." Everyone is always getting carried away in "Gatsby" (not least its narrator, Nick Carraway). They get swept up in big parties. They don't want to drink, but once the whiskey bottle is produced, they drink too much. They're led into back rooms where they meet gangsters. They become involved in love triangles. They accept the generosity of bad people; they borrow cars and drive too fast; they adopt mannerisms, and believe in principles which, last week, they didn't know existed. Everybody is getting carried away-but always in their own way. Daisy, when she sings along, sings "in a husky, rhythmic whisper, bringing out a meaning in each word that it had never had before and would never have again." Reading "Gatsby," you think: What could be more pleasurable? You meet someone at a party, and you find that their attitudes exert a force on yours. You become a little more like them, and, also, a little more yourself. It's a little like the way you fall in love with a pop song. You give in to the same song as everyone else, but in the most private, personal way.

In "The Great Gatsby," there are a few large ideas, a few common dreams, to which everybody is attracted. Gatsby's romantic fantasy, his love story, exerts the most force in the novel. Gatsby's organized his life around one big idea: that love, at its best, is permanent and impersonal. This is his dream, his song. A love affair seems like something that happens between two people at a particular time and place, but, Gatsby hopes, if their love is strong enough, it becomes a law of nature, a rule of fate that can't be changed by circumstance or even by choice. It's a familiar wish-we all want to be loved perfectly and forever-and it makes for a great story; there's something admirable in it, and, along with Nick, you wonder whether a Great Romance might complete your life. ("Unlike Gatsby and Tom Buchanan," Nick says, "I had no girl whose disembodied face floated along the dark cornices and blinding signs, and so I drew up the girl beside me, tightening her in my arms.")

But "Gatsby" isn't really a novel about love. It's more interested in the act of fantasizing than in any particular fantasy. Much of "The Great Gatsby" is spent watching as many dreams and fantasies as possible, including Gatsby's, rise and fall like the tides. There's the compelling dream of youth, with its parties, songs, and dances, with its sexuality, beauty, and athleticism. There's Nick's dream of the old America: the place to which you go home for the holidays, "my Middle West . . . where dwellings are still called through decades by a family's name." There's the vague dream of art (represented, dismally, by the photographer Mr. McKee, and by Gatsby's shirts, and by jazz). And on the margins are the dreams of intellectual life, business success, and family happiness. Gatsby is magnetic in part because he accepts everyone, no matter what it is they idealize: with a smile, Nick says, Gatsby "understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that he had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey." Only later do we realize that Gatsby is so open-minded because he is the ultimate dreamer and pretender.

"Gatsby" isn't an argument in favor of fantasy, though. It's about the costs of fantasy-inevitable costs, since our dreams and fantasies are part of who we are. It's through fantasy that we edit out the parts of our lives that make us uncomfortable, as Gatsby edits from his own story the criminality of the business he runs with Meyer Wolfsheim. And every fantasy has an apex from which it recedes. Every dream is both seductive and insufficient. Like a trader in the markets, you have to know when to get out of one and buy into another. (Gatsby, Nick concludes, made the mistake of "living too long with a single dream"; this makes him admirable, but also unwise, even delusional.) A kind of fatigue sets in. Eventually, nothing seems permanent or precious; everything becomes temporary and disposable. "It was all very careless and confused," Nick says, later. "They were careless people, Tom and Daisy-they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they made." Carelessness, the novel suggests, is one of the costs of fantasy. Often, to dream up a new life, you have to destroy the old one.

The real achievement of "Gatsby," in other words, is that it shows us a state of mind. It's a state of spiritual hunger and dissatisfaction, of restlessness and curiosity, of excitement and anticipation, in which one is, as Nick puts it, "within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life." All this unfolds beneath that disillusioned surface. This is how you feel when you understand that there is no obviously right way to live, but find that you must choose anyway. It's pessimistic and ironic, in the sense that you are always only half-committed to your way of life. But it's also exciting, because you are always on the edge of discovery. There's always something at stake. The main thing is that you are never settled. You are always hungry, always searching, always throwing feelings away in order to make room for new ones.

It's possible to believe, as many critics do, that this is a uniquely American state of mind, and there's a sense in which "Gatsby" is describing what it's like to be young in America. Youth is when we do the most weighing and choosing, when we try out new personalities until they become exhausted or destructive. And in a consumer society, youth is extended. We're increasingly free to pursue our fantasies, to buy the costumes and accouterments of the lives we'd like to have. The result is a kind of national carelessness that realizes itself economically, ecologically, and politically. Luhrmann's "Gatsby" gestures toward the link between our period and Fitzgerald's. Our pop hits take place "in the club," and, Luhrmann shows, so did theirs. We love cocktails and speakeasy bars, and so did they. As in the twenties, we tend to admire wealth, no matter how it's made.

But the real strength of Luhrmann's movie is that it turns inward-not toward psychological realism, exactly, but toward fantasy. "Gatsby" is, to the end, defiantly unrealistic. (The same is true of Fitzgerald's novel: it ends in the most lurid way possible, with a hit-and-run and a murder-suicide.) The best sequence in his movie is a montage of Daisy and Gatsby after they've gotten back together. They laugh and swim; Daisy dives into Gatsby's spectacular pool. She tries to drive a golf ball off Gatsby's dock, and, laughing, breaks the club. It's filmed like a photo shoot, and set to an arresting song by Lana Del Rey called "Young and Beautiful." The lyrics of the song exactly sum up Gatsby's wish. ("Will you still love me when I'm no longer young and beautiful? Will you still love me when I've got nothing but my aching soul? I know you will.") Del Rey, with her self-consciously retro sound, look, and pseudonym (her real name is Lizzy Grant), is the perfect singer to put at the center of "Gatsby." And the scene, which shows Daisy and Gatsby living out their fantasy lives, also shows them to us as fantasies. When Daisy, at Gatsby's party, asks, "Was all this made entirely from your own imagination?," her question is directed not just at him but at us. It captures one of the strange facts that "Gatsby" reveals: that even when we imagine our fantasy selves, we imagine them with unfulfilled fantasies of their own. We are watching the fantasies of fantasy people. We think: if only we could dream their dreams.

And there's another sense in which I think Lurhmann gets "Gatsby" exactly right. His movie, which is presented in 3-D, seems streamlined and pre-packaged-it's presented, self-consciously, as mass entertainment-and his characters feel flat, smoothed-out, uncomplicated. Many critics have charged the movie with flatness, too. In his excellent essay on the film, my colleague Richard Brody writes that "there's no roughness whatsoever to [DiCaprio's] character, none of life's burrs or scrapes, no tinge of real power"; Carey Mulligan, similarly, "doesn't invest the character with style or with substance." The director, he concludes, is "unable to take society seriously, to recognize the extraordinary character that extraordinary manners both hide and (for those attuned to them) display." These are legitimate, discerning objections, and yet I can't help but feel that the film's flatness is a deliberate choice; that what seems like a failure of Luhrmann's imagination is actually a faithfulness to Fitzgerald's. The characters are like that in the novel, too; that's why Lionel Trilling, in "The Liberal Imagination," compared them to "ideographs." Flatness, after all, is the state to which all of Fitzgerald's characters aspire. Even Gatsby, whose life thrums with secret ambition and desire, manages to be the cool man in the pink suit. "You always look so cool," Daisy tells him. In a moment of admiration, she says that he resembles "an advertisement" of a man.

The flatness of the characters in "Gatsby" is, I think, part of what makes it so insightful. It might seem as though, if we were to live out our fantasy lives, we would become more creative and expansive; we would be unfettered, alive, and truly ourselves. But "The Great Gatsby" doesn't think that fantasies work that way. In "Gatsby," everyone wants to be simpler than they really are. Everyone wants to give himself up to something that will define, constrain, and explain him-to be swept up into a fantasy that's narrower than the life he really lives. Everyone is a fantasist, and, therefore, an actor, a "beautiful little fool."

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The Serious Superficiality of The Great Gatsby

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Baz Luhrmann's "The Great Gatsby" is lurid, shallow, glamorous, trashy, tasteless, seductive, sentimental, aloof, and artificial. It's an excellent adaptation, in other words, of F. Scott Fitzgerald's melodramatic American classic. Luhrmann, as expected, has turned "Gatsby" into a theme-park ride. But he's done it in exactly the right way.

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Exemplar AQA AS student response to an Othello question.

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Exemplar AQA AS student response to an Othello question.

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In her novel Regeneration, Pat Barker uses character development to emphasize the various themes in the novel. Pat Barker includes Robert Graves, a well known poet and writer, as a secondary character in a fictional setting. We are first introduced to Robert Graves on page five, where he meets with a very good friend Siegfried Sassoon in the lounge of the Exchange Hotel. During their conversation, they express, through their actions and language, a deep love for one another. In Barker's Regeneration, the importance of love and intimate friendship between men during war develops from the relationship between Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon.

As Miranda Seymour tells us, Robert Graves was born in Wimbledon, near London. He was the first born son to Amalie von Ranke Graves and Alfred Perceval Graves. He was a handsome little boy with wide gray eyes and black curly hair. He attended seven different schools throughout his life. As a child he attended Wimbledon branch of King's College, but then was removed for using inappropriate language. He then was sent to Rokeby and made his name as a quarrelsome bully. Soon there after, he attended a school near Rugby "where he learned the forceful style of English which enabled him to appeal to a lay audience even with the most obscure subjects" (Seymour). Finally, his last preparatory school was Copthrone which was located in Sussex (Seymour). In 1913 he received a scholarship to study at St. John's College, Oxford but soon after, in 1914, he enlisted as a Junior Officer in the Royal Welch Fusiliers ("Robert Graves").

As a solider in World War I, Graves became injured in the battle of Somme. During his recovery, he published his first poetic collection, Over the Brazier. Although confused about his sexuality as an adolescent and about his innocent crushes on boys, he married, at the age of twenty-two, the eighteen-year-old Nancy Nicholson with whom he had four children. With the war memories haunting Graves, he and his wife moved so he could go back to Oxford to teach at St. John's College. Though he was a teacher and a writer, Robert Graves considered himself a poet. According to Graves a poet is "one who uses all the resources of language and his own talent to articulate man's overcoming of the cruel face of one's historical period" ("Biography"). The early poetry of Robert Graves' deals with natural beauty, rustic pleasures, and the consequences of World War I. Graves' early poetry was a way for him to overcome his nightmares, hallucinations, and tortured memories of death from his war experience ("Biography"). This early poetry was considered to be Georgian, lyric poetry while maintaining the late-romantic style ("Graves"). Over the Brazier and Fairies and Fusiliers gave Graves the reputation as an accomplished war poet ("Robert Graves").

Later, Graves' writing changed style to terse and ironic poems written on personal themes. This significant change was influenced by a well-known American poet Laura Riding, with whom he ran off after he and his wife had permanently separated. The vacation to Majorca with Laura was cut short due to the breakout of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 ("Robert Graves"). Robert Graves continued to write through this time and was recognized for his many books and essays. In all, Graves has published 140 books including fifty-five collections of poetry, fifteen novels, ten translations, and forty works of nonfiction, autobiography, and literary essays. Toward the end of his life Graves was a professor of poetry at Oxford. In his later life, he went back to Majorca where he lived until his death. He died at the age of ninety in 1985 ("Robert Graves").

Robert Graves is placed in Regeneration for the reader to grasp the theme of love between men. Barker has chosen to place the introduction of Graves' character in the beginning of the novel on page five. The scene opens with Siegfried Sassoon remembering his last meeting with Robert Graves. He thinks of how he was so excited to see Graves that he jumped up and ran across the lounge of the hotel to greet him. Graves was there because of a letter -- or, rather, Declaration-- Sassoon had written protesting the war. Sassoon's declaration was illegal and went against all that was right, according to his military contract. As Graves will emphasize in chapter three, he feels that a man should obey and be faithful to his contract. Graves wanted to talk to Sassoon in person and offer some advice. The consideration Graves shows Sassoon by coming to visit him before he was sent to Craiglockhart is the first introduction into this theme of love between men. They are both compassionate and caring toward one another.

Throughout Regeneration, there are numerous relationships that contribute to this same theme, originally introduced by Graves and Sassoon, notably, the relationship between Sassoon and his men. One of the main reasons Sassoon decides to go back to the front is he doesn't want to let down the men in his division. In chapter 16, Sassoon tells of how he feels guilty he isn't there for his men and says to Rivers: "They [Sassoon's men] can't understand why I'm here" (Barker 189). This guilt demonstrates dedication, comradeship, and the love he has for them. Society favors this kind of love because it engenders a better army overall.

The other love between men brought in through numerous parts of Regeneration is that of homosexuality. This "wrong" type of love is looked down upon by society, especially during war. Rivers advises Sassoon in chapter six not to let his sexuality become known because it would discredit his political views. Knowing Sassoon's sexuality leaves the reader with the question of Graves' sexuality, given they are such close friends. The question of Robert Graves' sexuality is not answered but it is implied that he and Sassoon were once intimate; however, in Chapter 17, Graves clearly says that he is not a homosexual "even in thought." Graves tells Sassoon that his "affections are running in normal channels now" and he would "hate for him to think he was homosexual." Graves also makes it apparent that he is now writing letters to Nancy Nicholson, a girl who he has been writing for a while now (Barker 199). The sexuality of the characters plays into the theme of love between men by offering another example of the love men can share with one another.

Another loving relationship between which men Pat Barker emphasizes in the novel is the relationship of Dr. Rivers and his patients. Rivers offers a sort of fatherly, and in some cases motherly, affection. He listens to all of his patients and does whatever it takes to help them recover, in most cases from shell shock. In chapter two, Rivers is sitting down with Sassoon to have some tea so that he can better understand and evaluate Sassoon's mental stability. Rivers is very honest and demonstrates it when he says he is an army psychiatrist and one of the paradoxes of it is "that you don't get very far by ordering your patients to be frank" (Barker 12). Rivers is having a conversation with Sassoon rather than Rivers asking a series of questions and Sassoon answering, or Rivers lecturing Sassoon on how he should quit being a coward and go back to the front. He wants his patients to be able to talk about their tragic war experiences rather than forget them. He is always there for his patients and is willing to listen, offer advice, and give them a love that is comforting, like a mother's love.

In addition to a fatherly/motherly relationship, as seen with Rivers and his patients and comradeship as seen with Sassoon and his troop of soldiers, we have a brotherly love formed between Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen. They each have a great interest in poetry, which they share with one another, and they are opposed to the war. Both of these men are homosexuals, but despite their sexual preference, their relationship is a loving friendship. Sassoon offers Owen advice on his writings as an older brother would do for his little brother. In addition, Sassoon also thinks of Owen as a "junior officer" because when they met, Owen wanted an autograph and he stood at his elbow just as a junior officer would (Barker 83). Owen and Sassoon both use poetry as their therapy to escape from their haunting memories and have each other there to listen and understand.

In Barker's novel, we see many loving relationships formed between various characters which makes the theme, love between men during war, more prominent. The fact that men can share a love for one another during such a horrific war is because with a fellow solider you can say exactly what you want and be understood. It is easier if the experience is discussed with someone who is familiar with the situation. The importance of Graves is to be supportive yet concerned for his good friend Sassoon and to be there for him. He understands what Sassoon is going through because he has been through everything that Sassoon has. This relationship offers the introduction of the theme, love between men during war, a theme not only represented in the novel but in all times of war.

Barker, Pat. Regeneration. New York: Plume, 2003.

"Graves, Robert Von Ranke." Encarta Microsoft Encyclopedia Standard. 2002 ed. CD rom. Microsoft Corporation, 2002.

"Biography of Robert Graves." Robert Graves Website Project. 13 April 2003.

"Robert Graves." Academy of American Poets. 13 April 2003. < www.poets.org>

Seymour, Miranda. Robert Graves: Life on the Edge. 1995. 14 Apr. 2003. < http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpsrv/style/longterm/books/chap1/lifeonedge.htm>.

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Pat Barker's Regeneration -- Critical Contexts -- Robert Graves

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In her novel Regeneration, Pat Barker uses character development to emphasize the various themes in the novel. Pat Barker includes Robert Graves, a well known poet and writer, as a secondary character in a fictional setting. We are first introduced to Robert Graves on page five, where he meets with a very good friend Siegfried Sassoon in the lounge of the Exchange Hotel.

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The Diamond as Big as the Ritz and other short stories by F Scott Fitzgerald.

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The Diamond as Big as the Ritz and other short stories by F Scott Fitzgerald.

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Idolatrous Love: A New Approach to Othello on JSTOR

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R. N. Hallstead, Idolatrous Love: A New Approach to Othello, Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 19, No. 2 (Spring, 1968), pp. 107-124