Reality of PTSD

When I finished reading Waltz with Bashir I was not sure what to make of the novel as a whole. The reality and brutality it portrays and the journey to rediscover that reality and bring it to light.  But when I was able to set the novel down and step back I was drawn back to the article we read with Maus on PTSD. I feel that this graphic novel really captures the stress of trauma and the power of the mind to both cover up and remember traumatic events.  While reading I often found myself trying to figure out the chronology of events as the novel jumps from one person’s memories to another person’s, and going from an anecdote back to the memory of the war.  The Traumatic Stress article notes that the difference between a stressed person and someone suffering with PTSD is that “they start organizing their lives around the trauma” (6).  The closed nature of a novel, and the fact that this novel is one man’s journey to uncover the reality behind one particular memory, for me, presents the tension and stress behind trauma, war, loss, etc. that the other graphic novels we have read about war were not able to capture.

The novel begins with the image of the hungry wolf-like dogs hunting down the narrator, which immediately put me on guard for what would come — it set up a sense of insecurity, entrapment, fear which parallels the feelings created from PTSD.  And then the novel ends with the abrupt switch to actual photos from the massacre that has remained in a limbo state between real memories and false/uncertain memories, but then becomes too real.  The reality of the final images i think shows the power of the mind to forget such images, and the power of the mind to protect oneself from those images and memories.