The Ghost Road Passage Analysis

The feelings of war and its horrors come alive when Barker uses a journalistic approach to describing the scenes. Given enough time, the reader can immerse him or herself into Barker’s writing and feel close enough to the emotions of the soldiers. Pat Barker utilizes environment and relatable scenarios in The Ghost Road in order to show the effects of psychological damage that can come with warfare. Barker takes advantage of the physical effects of warfare and molds the environment in order to reflect appropriate scenery.

            The environment represents the soldier during phases of the war. Barker begins by describing the road as “craters, stinking mud, stagnant water, trees like gigantic burnt matches” and that the “can’t possibly recover” (Barker 240). In doing so, she implies that the soldiers cannot return to way they once were. The environment is reflective of what the soldiers currently are like. Even though it is not being torn to shreds, the damage is done and cleaning it up will be an impossible task. But the soldiers walking back are not physically damaged as much as they are psychologically. The march back to base turns out to bring nostalgia of this “Ghost Road” that has passed and become something referred to as “utter devastation.” Barker then brings in the voice of the narrator by stating his feelings: “too close to death ourselves to make a fuss” (Barker 241). The men do not find the environment bothersome because they have bigger problems to worry about. Their lower needs on Maslow’s hierarchy have yet to be met, so they do not pay much attention to the psychological damage done by the events of war. Barker also uses a short anecdote to help the audience understand the situation better.

            Side stories let the reader to draw comparisons and ultimately relate better to the scenario. In this passage, the narrator summarizes a story of “an old couple who’d been married over fifty years and everybody thought when one of them went the other would be devastated. But when the husband died the old lady didn’t seem all that upset.” Readers who cannot relate to war because they have never experienced it first time might have an easier time understand the effects of a loved one dying. Normally the old lady would be broken and dejected, but instead she does not feel the emotion that usually comes with losing a husband. Likewise, the soldiers find their own scenario rather demoralizing and cannot sympathize for anything else. Again, Barker puts her theme of psychological despair right in front of the reader clear as day. In order to get her message across she needed to hit home.

            In a small excerpt from the book The Ghost Road, Pat Barker displays a few of her main methods of crafting the texture of her story. Her literary tools are mainly used to clarify the subject matter because war requires special description. She relies on the image and motif given off by the environment in order to categorize feelings, while short anecdotes and allusions allow the reader to better relate to the text.  At the end of the passage, there is a deeper understanding of the feelings of the soldiers this text describes.