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Billy Prior
David Burns is an officer in the British army and Rivers’s most traumatized patient in Craiglockhart. After a shell explosion throw Burns through the air and he lands headfirst in a rotting corpse whose flesh fills his nose and mouth, Burns is so traumatized that he cannot eat anything without immediately choking and vomiting it up. As a result, on top of his night terrors, Burns grows dangerously thin. Although Rivers has seen plenty of trauma and misery before, Burns’s experience is so horrific that Rivers cannot bring himself to push Burns to reflect and re-experience it as he would with most patients. Rivers is particularly pained because Burns was obviously once a very cheerful and likable young man, but the war has utterly destroyed his psyche and chance at an ordinary life. Burns is discharged from service and returns to military service midway through the story, returning to live in a small seaside village where his family spent their summers. However, Burns’s pain continues even into civilian life. Several citizens who do not understand war neurosis label him a coward, and his hallucinations and night terrors continue. When Rivers, visiting Burns at his home, sees his patient have another mental breakdown during a storm, Rivers feels that nothing in war or the world could justify inflicting such pain on a young man like Burns. Although Rivers eventually decides that Burns might someday at least have a functional life, he will never be normal again, and thus embodies the horrific cost of war.
David Burns Quotes in Regeneration
The Regeneration quotes below are all either spoken by David Burns or refer to David Burns. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 4
Quotes
“I’ve worried everybody, haven’t I?”
“Never mind that. You’re back, that’s all that matters.”
All the way back to the hospital Burns had kept asking himself why he was going back, Now, waking up to find Rivers sitting by his bed, unaware of being observed, tired and patient, he’d realized he’d come back for this.
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Chapter 13
Quotes
Rivers got up and went across to the window. He found a bumble bee, between the curtain and the window, batting itself against the glass, fetched a file from the desk and, using it as a barrier, guided the insect into the open air. He watched it fly away.
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Chapter 15
Quotes
Rivers thought how misleading it was to say that the war had “matured” these young men. It wasn’t true of his patients, and it certainly wasn’t true of Burns, in whom a prematurely aged man and fossilizes schoolboy seemed to exist side by side.
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[Burns’s] body felt like a stone. Rivers got hold of him and held him, coaxing, rocking. He looked up at the tower that loomed squat and menacing above them, and thought, Nothing justifies this. Nothing nothing nothing
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Get the entire Regeneration LitChart as a printable PDF.
David Burns Quotes in Regeneration
The Regeneration quotes below are all either spoken by David Burns or refer to David Burns. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 4
Quotes
“I’ve worried everybody, haven’t I?”
“Never mind that. You’re back, that’s all that matters.”
All the way back to the hospital Burns had kept asking himself why he was going back, Now, waking up to find Rivers sitting by his bed, unaware of being observed, tired and patient, he’d realized he’d come back for this.
Related Characters:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 13
Quotes
Rivers got up and went across to the window. He found a bumble bee, between the curtain and the window, batting itself against the glass, fetched a file from the desk and, using it as a barrier, guided the insect into the open air. He watched it fly away.
Related Characters:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 15
Quotes
Rivers thought how misleading it was to say that the war had “matured” these young men. It wasn’t true of his patients, and it certainly wasn’t true of Burns, in whom a prematurely aged man and fossilizes schoolboy seemed to exist side by side.
Related Characters:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
[Burns’s] body felt like a stone. Rivers got hold of him and held him, coaxing, rocking. He looked up at the tower that loomed squat and menacing above them, and thought, Nothing justifies this. Nothing nothing nothing
Related Characters:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
