Ernest Hemingway's A Clean Well-Lighted Place is set right after WWI. It's a simple story about an old man in a bar drinking late at night. It's also a story of despair and loneliness. The light in the story is significant in that the main character stays in the bar so he doesn't have to face the darkness. Throughout Hemingway speaks of nothingness: "It was all a nothing and a man was nothing too. It was only that and light was all it needed and a certain cleanliness and order. Some lived in it and never felt it but he knew it all was nada [nothing] y pues nana y nana y pues nada." The "it" is the unspeakable horror of war perhaps and the destruction of masculinity. The old man is seeming to say that there is nothing left in life, there is no meaning and nothing matters.
Hemingway actually served in WWI and became seriously injured. After the war, may soldiers came back with post-traumatic stress disorder, or shell shock. Take a look at this video:
The video above is one of the first depections we have of post-traumatic stress distorder. Freud called this hysteria. War is obviously still prevalent today with many people deal with this after being in Iraq and Afghanistan.
What do you think of this video? Do you think men that come back from serving have this same sense of nothingness in life?
Friday, July 3, 2009
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The video was incredibly sad. I found the concluding quote, "There are no unwounded soldiers in war", to be very thought-provoking. I definitely agree with that sentiment. I believe that many soldiers do come back from serving in war with a changed perspective on life, whether it is a sense of nothingness I suppose depends on the individual soldier. I hope though in the almost one hundred years since WWI that our assistance in helping soldiers adjust to life after war has vastly improved. KE
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