Understanding Depression in A Soldier's Home and A Sorrowful Woman - Essay Example

?Understanding Depression in A Soldier’s Home and A Sorrowful Woman The plots of these two stories, A Soldier’s Home and A Sorrowful Woman, are similar in that they show a gradual withdrawal from life of the two main characters. However, the endings are very different. In Hemingway's work, Krebs is still alive at the end of the story, and so there is still hope that he could possibly recover from his clinical depression. However, the unnamed wife in Godwin's story kills herself, and is, therefore, beyond help. We meet Krebs in the beginning on the battlefield. Of course, as is common in urgent situations where people feel their lives threatened, Krebs makes a promise to God, but he doesn't keep it. In fact, immediately after he is out of the battle and no longer feels and sees shells falling around him and men dying, he reverts to his old behavior. He goes immediately to a bordello, and continues to smoke and drink just as before. We do not ever find out in the story how seriously he takes the break of his promise to God. We have not seen any evidence after he returns home that he is religious at all. The woman in Godwin’s story is at home and the woman asks the husband to put the boy to bed and read him a story. She is detached from them and does not want to ever see them again. We do see evidence of clinical depression in both characters; according to the American psychological Association's DSM IV diagnostic methodology, we can assume that Krebs suffers from PTSD {{7888 Butcher, J. N. 2010}} (Posttraumatic Stress Disorder). However, this is never diagnosed, so Krebs does not get any treatment. It is remotely possible, since the boy is only three, that the woman suffers from prolonged post-partum depression, but it is more likely complicated by some other form of depression{{259 Springer-Kremser,M. 2006}} . The treatment she is given is sleeping potions, which are not particularly effective. Considering the timeframe of the story, this is not surprising. Krebs comes home from the war and moves back in to his parents’ home. Because he came home months after the other returnees, there is no greeting celebration at the train station. So, coming home seems more like a retreat from the war, than a return to normalcy. Krebs has already begun to retreat on his way home by analyzing his participation in the war. This continues after he arrives back in his hometown. The woman retreats a little at a time, divesting herself of duties and then contact. Krebs tries telling the truth, but that is boring, as compared to what other soldiers have talked about when they got home. So Krebs tries telling stories that he knows, as if they were his own. However, this gets little attention, since everyone is really tired of war stories. After that Krebs stops talking altogether. He assumes false modesty to cover up his feelings of inadequacy. Krebs stays at home, sitting on the front porch and watching people. At first he goes to dances and thinks about the local girls. He compares the whores with whom he consorted overseas to the local girls. He did not have to talk to the whores, and in fact, couldn't. He decides the local girls are more real, but he's totally afraid to approach any of them, and feels better even when they are walking across the street, rather than down his side of the street. He fantasizes, but soon even fantasizing becomes boring, so he stops watching altogether, deciding that he doesn't need a girl. He begins going to the library and getting books to read on the porch and visiting the pool hall at night, just to play pool. The woman simply stops doing anything except sleeping and sitting. Her husband hires an aupair who takes care of the family, but cannot get her to come out. There is a brief period when she is able to go out with her husband, but this does not last. It is uncertain why, but the woman insists on firing the very competent girl and the husband has to take over all the household chores and childcare. She moves into the room the girl had occupied and only comes out when nobody is awake. When Krebs’s sister comes to ask him to watch her pitch baseball, he tells her he'll think about it. It is possible that his sister knows that something is wrong and is simply trying to get him to come out. They talk about loving each other and he calls her “his girl”. There is no hint of incestuous thought, but we get the idea that Krebs has decided that he will not have a girlfriend. The woman starts doing chores at night when nobody is awake and leaving them done. She had been accepting notes from her husband and son, but she finally even feels trapped by the notes. When Krebs's mother comes to talk to him about her worry that he is not doing anything, we get a hint of how seriously is breaking his promises to God might have been. It seems that it is not so much that he is afraid that God will punish him, but that he seems to have ceased to believe in God. His mother tells him of her worries and asks him if he loves her. He says he doesn't love anybody. Then he sees that he's just hurt her, and she doesn't understand what he means. He tells her that he didn't mean it, and that he was just angry at something. Anger is often connected with the expression of depression {{808 Shneidman,Edwin S. 1969}}. We get the idea that Krebs is angry with God. The woman never gives us a reason for her depression. We just note that the husband is, perhaps, accommodating too nd she is not getting well. When his mother insists that he pray with her Krebs goes through the motions, gets down on his knees, but does not speak. When his mother asks him to pray, he declines. He tells her he can't and so she offers to pray for him, to which he agrees. However, because he sees that many things will be expected of him, he decides that he has to leave home. All he wants out of life is for it to go smoothly, a classic sign of the absence of hope that is often present in clinical depression {{8246 Ruddick, Fred 2008}}. So he will go away from home, get a job and go through the motions. At the end of the story he makes up his mind to watch Helen pitch baseball, just to keep people happy. We understand that he is closing himself off to any real participation in life in order to avoid feeling. The woman takes a different pathway to freedom by doing enough chores and making notes, writing poems and cooking in order to last a while and then takes her own life. We never really understand the cause of her depression. The characterization is somewhat different in these two stories. The third person omniscient point of view in both stories lets us understand the thoughts of these characters and some of their motivation, or lack there-of. However, we have much more sympathy for the woman. We think about the man Krebs as a soldier suffering PTSD and we do sympathize, but the sympathy fades when he goes right back to his former behavior after promising Jesus he would give it up. His thoughts seem also to be uncaring and quite insulting. Even though this is actually a sign of the anger expressing the depression, most people would not know this and really not identify with this character any more. Frankly, we just do not like Krebs. The woman in Gale Godwin’s story is sympathetic. We feel like she is mistreating her husband by being unreasonable, but we can be more understanding, because she is not unkind. We know something is wrong, and we know that the treatment is probably not useful, so we feel badly for her. So, the ending is actually quite sad, because there is no hope for the woman to recover and the man and his son are left alone. Read More