'Like a Pupa Starting to Hatch': The Aesthetics of War and Ethics of Peace in Pat Barker's 'Double Vision'

Pat Barker’s novel Double Vision (2003) addresses the ethics and aesthetics of witnessing and representing suffering in the context of recent hyper-mediated ‘postmodern’ wars (Bosnia, Afghanistan) and a global audience anaesthetized by spectacular excess. Her compelling exploration of the aesthetics of violence against issues of value, morality, shared humanity and truth, and the way she responds to them by weighing the potential of different art forms, provide a forceful poetic statement of the ethical possibilities of peace. As the protagonists confront the moral choices underlying the narrative, visual and ideological challenges of rendering the ‘unsayable’ and the ‘unwatchable’, relationality, partnership, emotional commitment, poetic truth and affect emerge as key steps towards viable responses to the experience of evil informing human life and art alike.