PTSD and Hemingway’s “A Way You’ll Never Be”: The Mark of Confidence

Hemingway’s short story, “A Way You’ll Never Be,” was published in 1933, forty-seven years before post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) was first defined and acknowledged as a mental health disorder by the American Psychiatric Society in its 1980 release of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). And yet, as Charles Coleman so astutely conveys in this in-depth analysis: “Ernest Hemingway described the symptoms of PTSD—and the inner workings of soldiers’ minds so afflicted—decades before post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) was recognized as a clinical condition. So striking are his depictions of ‘stressors’ and their effects upon his protagonist that discernible ‘patterns of affliction’ can be identified and actually tracked through the mental meanderings of Nicholas Adams in portraying situations, symptoms and manifestations of ‘the disorder’ that mirror today’s quest to better understand both PTSD and traumatic brain injury or TBI.

Far from “emotion recollected in tranquility,”⁵ Nick opens the short story with the signature signs of PTSD frequently occurring with an inventory of memorable minutia and often catalogued in the mind of the afflicted with tedious repetition. Frequently triggered by a stressor, these inventories are spontaneously generated from memory but are just as often unreliable once applied to the factual chronology of actual events. Additionally, people suffering from PTSD create various types of cerebral timelines, sometimes as simple as short vignettes of loosely connected mental pictures, some with action, speech, soundtracks, words, and associated odors. But these timelines are really just disconnected snippets of memories and not always accurate nor sequential and so do not conform to the more traditional definition of timeline as a way of describing and displaying a list of events in a strict chronological sequence or order. Timelines, along which key events are posted, are sometimes referred to as project artifacts (“using art” + “something made”) in which events and milestones are highlighted and enumerated in a graphic design displayed along a time bar.

Nicholas Adams begins stockpiling his memorable minutia with his inventories of the dead and their associated artifacts starting with “papers” and “paper” (at the end of the second paragraph) that are repeated in each of the two following paragraphs intermixed with “postcards,” “cards,” “photographs,” “pictures,” and “the letters, letters, letters” of the dead.

 PTSD and Hemingway’s “A Way You’ll Never Be”: The Mark of Confidence is the perfect companion piece to Coleman’s Sergeant Back Again: The Anthology of Critical and Clinical Commentary.