Billy Prior

• Important details: Fictional character, Barker is able to manipulate him to her liking. She constructs him as an outsider. A little different to the rest. At times rebellious, but then warm-hearted. Firstly, he is cold and uncooperative with Rivers and his treatments. Soon we begin to sympathise with Prior due to his background which reveals his insecurity of being an outsider. Sarah introduced to provoke a sense of choice, does he return to the war and fulfill what his father always wanted of him, to commit to something stereotypically masculine. Or, does he find purpose in Sarah and her love
• ID P2: Described as "neither fish nor fowl" His dad always believed Billy was better than his clerk job, but never ambitious enough to bypass his mother's outlook, in which she thought that the job rather suited him. Dilemma's over his masculinity occur repeatedly. ""I don't think talking helps. It just churns things up and makes them seem more real." Echoes his father's outlook "He'd get a damn sight more sympathy out of me with a bullet up his arse"
• ID P3: He has a strong desire to be loved, this can be seen when he asks Sarah if she loves him. He wants a sense of belonging and to be accepted. After all, he is a temporary gentleman, something who is only temporarily promoted to fill the boots of an upper class officer who is disengaged. There is no permanent place to his life thus far. He is also subject to discrimination on the front "It is made perfectly clear" it helps having attended the "right school" or wearing shirts of "The right colour, which is a deep shade of khaki"
• CH6: Rivers speaks with Prior, who has gotten his voice back in the night. He says that his voice comes and goes, but he does not know why. Prior is a difficult patient; he does not want to talk about his dreams or his experiences because he doesn't think "talking helps. It just churns things up and makes them seem more real." When Rivers gets up to leave, Prior becomes more cooperative.
• Ch6 continued: He tells Rivers a little about what he remembers. In the war, he would have to stand in a dugout in No Man's Land—the neutral ground between the English and German trenches—for forty-eight hours at a time, just to "protect" the land. The Germans would do their best to bomb the men in the hole the entire time. The last thing Prior remembers is being carried out of the hole.
• CH6: Rivers finds Prior watching the cinema on the first floor.His asthma is very bad, and his wheezing is loudly audible. Rivers brings Prior into the sick bay to examine him. Prior tells Rivers that he did not want his father to come barging in as he did. Prior does not like his father, who he admits used to "use my mother as a football" when Prior was too young to stop it. Prior says his asthma was better in France than it ever was at home. The scene is contrasted by the entertainment that is occuring downstairs, where Charlie Chaplin erupts people in laughter, Billy is not laughing at all.
• He recognizes that talking about their feelings goes against the "whole tenor of their upbringing." He acknowledges that "they had been trained to identify emotional repression as the essence of manliness." If they let go of this repression, they might associate with being twice emasculated. This is Prior's main problem; he resists Rivers's method because, as a boy, he was trained to be as masculine as possible. He would even rather undergo hypnosis—a physical submission—than release his feelings in what he sees as an emotional submission.
• CH7: Rivers visits Prior in his room and finds him reading one of the books Rivers published years ago. Prior is the one who was screaming the previous night. He apologizes to Rivers and admits that he wants to impress him. Rivers tells Prior that such a feeling is very common. They begin talking about how Prior "fit in" on the front. Prior laughs at the thought that there are no class distinctions on the front; a soldier is judged by what "shake of khaki" his uniform is, what "school" you went to and where you sleeps.
• CH7: "It's made perfectly clear" about the class distinctions on the front. Prior then references COTLB by ALT in a satirical way "Their tiny tiny minds, they really do believe the whole things going to end in one big glorious cavalry charge "Stormed at with shot and shell/Boldly they rode and well/into the jaws of death/into the mouth of hell" And all. That. Rubbish. Upon experiencing war, you know the reality of it. It's no longer that "Great Adventure" it was once perceived to be. This is the reality.
• Rivers is in a session with Prior. Prior tells the doctor in detail what it is like to attack from a trench. He talks about climbing up and walking slowly, in broad daylight, right toward the machine guns. He is emotionally detached from the story he is telling, describing it as both "ridiculous" and "sexy." Prior assumes that he and Rivers are on different sides and one of them has to win. The war is so abstract and ridiculous to the point it is "sexy"
• CH9: Under hypnosis, Prior remembers waking up in a trench for duty one morning. As he walked down the path to check on the other men, he heard a shell overhead. He turned around to see that there was nothing left of two of his men who had been cooking breakfast. As he ran to shovel their remains into a bag, he picked up an eyeball and vomited. He finished cleaning up and then went to report the death of the two men.
• CH9: Prior "What am i supposed to do with this gobstopper?" Gobstopper's stop you from speaking - cause of mutism. Satirical remark made out of shock. "What am i" sense of duty - The scene could have contributed to his lack of purpose and belonging in life. In a situation where he is held accountable like such, he crumbled, not by his own fault, but it may have reinforced his insecurity about belonging.
• CH9: When he is brought out of hypnosis, Prior feels intensely angry. He feels responsible for the deaths of his two men. He recalls the story of an officer who commands that his troops fire on another regiment, only to find out that they are English, not German. He says he knows what that officer must have felt like. Rivers consoles Prior that there is no one kind of man who breaks down.
• CH9: Prior seizes Rivers in the chest with a series of headbutts desperately trying to overcome the overwhelming nature of the experience. "Rivers was reminded of a nanny goat" - Rivers is playing the absent role of a mother to his patients in CL. It echoed how one former patient likened him to a "male mother" filling the absence of parental outlet in this horrific war.
• CH9 "I don't think of myself as the type of person who breaks down" - Traditional masculinity engrained in Prior. Extremely hard to accept the facts.
• ch12: He is capricious in his feelings toward Sarah, despising her one moment and desiring her the next. Later, in the pub, Prior tries to destroy their moment by bringing up a topic Sarah clearly does not want to discuss. For Sarah, Prior, and the crowds, the beach is an escape from reality and from the war. But Prior cannot allow such a mental escape to continue; he loathes the luxury that others have of choosing to "forget." Consequently, he tries to hurt Sarah by bringing the war back into her consciousness, refusing to let her escape from the reality he must face.
• CH13: Prior feels he has failed because he broke down, and he wants to return to the front to prove himself.
• CH18: After the Board session, Rivers finds Prior crying. He has been granted permanent home service. Prior is ashamed and upset that he will never know what kind of officer he could have been. Rivers tries to assure Prior that there is nothing at all to be ashamed about; he has been through hell, and it is understandable that he should suffer "nerves" because of it. After all, it is Prior's asthma, not his psychological state, that got him permanent home service. Prior admits that Rivers reminds him of his mother. The two men part on good terms.