the tight hold of social codes. Furthermore, Waterman cites Moscovici in reminding us that social representations “determine reality by controlling how the past is constructed, remembered and legitimated,” and this could include reinforcing memories that foster a preoccupation with loss rather than healing. These codes attempt to deny an individual's traumatic experience, meaning the destructive effects of violence and oppression that alienate people from themselves, prevent healing, and perpetuate helplessness and misery. Public recognition of these consequences, Barker hopes, might undermine powerful social interests that sanction or create the traumatic scenarios that devastate the lives of the less powerful. For example, the rich and powerful benefit from poor workers (capitalists generally), and from the military/industrial complex (arms manufacturers). Waterman also demonstrates how Barker deconstructs this process for readers, how she “encourages us to interrogate the reality created by such conventionalizing, prescriptive representations in favor of a reality more accurately represented through a critical assessment of the uses and abuses of collective representations” (5). Barker guides this interrogation by juxtaposing the imposition of social codes against the individuals who struggle to survive and articulate their experiences, with a keen focus on individual suffering and consciousness. Waterman indicates that Barker “highlights the importance of human beings, of their bodies and minds which become…the locus of political struggle, manipulated, controlled and finally destroyed by the same power which creates and defines it” (66). As some of the characters struggle with the ethical implications of minimizing the evidence of wounds and denying reality, readers are prompted by this to question the costs of war and other forms of dominance and power that shape society.
Waterman covers Barker's eleven novels comprehensively in Pat Barker and the Mediation of Social Reality, and notes how the contrast between social inscription and traumatic experience is a repeated theme that is revisited in different contexts in each text. Inscriptions of masculinity and conformity into a war culture that needs heroes and warriors to perpetuate it are examined in the Regeneration trilogy and Life Class.