Dear Reader

Dear Reader,

In the end, I think that my project did (for the most part) what I intended.

My expository essay actually changed a lot while I was writing it. Going in, I wanted to write very generally about the psychological effects of the war, as I had said in my initial blog posts, and use a couple quotes from the novel to support key points. I knew one of my points would be about the development of the idea of PTSD, but I didn’t think that that would be the majority of the paper. In the end, I guess it ended up being a sort of tie-in of PTSD into the novel, explaining how the symptoms become themes and what repercussions those themes had in real life. I think that this is much better than my original idea, as it involves the novel much more and also allows me to bring in knowledge from one of my other favorite classes, AP Psych (without psych, I would not have known to look at the DSMs). My main issue with the change is that I'm not sure how well the other works I mentioned work with the rest of the essay. I would have continued to talk about Hemingway, but I felt that it was important to get other examples of wartime literature to give a more complete picture of the causes of the "symptoms" of the war I talked about in the rest of the essay.

When I first read the novel, I was still skeptical as to how well I would be able to connect it to World War I. As I said in my essay, the war is mentioned very rarely. I know that I gave a couple examples in my in-process posts, but I didn’t know if I could find specific quotes that would work perfectly with my points. Once I started writing the essay, it all came together. It wasn’t until I was looking at the DSMs that I noticed the thick web of the war’s effects that Hemingway weaves in the novel, with each symptom of PTSD as a gateway to understanding the subtleties of these effects. For this reason, several paragraphs of my essay deal with different aspects of PTSD.

For the genres, I wanted to capture the life of a World War I soldier with PTSD. Real examples of this are hard to find, of course, as “PTSD” did not exist at the time. So, I took my knowledge of psychology and my creative skills and tried to create an accurate example.

The “golden thread” of my genres is Joe Nelson. All four pieces tell different parts of his story through different lenses. I put the pieces on my blog in chronological order for this reason. They show a clear progression--going downhill--that I think is very important to understanding the experience of the war’s soldiers. From a plot standpoint, my first genre is a sort of exposition, my second the climax, my third the falling action, and my fourth a sort of denouement; from excitement to chaos to despair to a tentative hope. From my limited knowledge of what it’s like to live in a war (as every war-related novel we’ve read this year has proved, only a soldier can truly understand war), I think this is the closest I could have gotten to the truth.