{"id":778,"date":"2009-11-07T18:39:51","date_gmt":"2009-11-07T23:39:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/archives\/778"},"modified":"2009-11-07T18:39:51","modified_gmt":"2009-11-07T23:39:51","slug":"the-mans-wife-and-ptsd","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/archives\/778","title":{"rendered":"The man’s wife and PTSD"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cShe was gone and the coldness of it was her final gift. She would do it with a flake of obsidian\u201d (p. 58), said the narrator of the Road<\/em>. The wife of the man who was supposed to take care of the boy decided instead to give up by committing suicide. When I say \u201csupposed\u201d is to emphasize the idea that the man\u2019s wife failed in protecting her son. Thus, I find it very ironic that the man\u2019s love for his son was stronger. I am not suggesting, however, that men love their children less than women do. I am just wondering what would be the effect of this story if it was the woman and the boy who took this journey of going South to escape the cruel northern cold and strived for survival.<\/p>\n

\u00a0As we already know she is the protagonist who is already dead. And she is described only through flashbacks. The selfishness of her actions suggests a mental illness because by committing suicide without taking in consideration her son\u2019s needs is just abnormal. The horrible conditions that the man, the boy and the man\u2019s wife went trough in \u201cThe Road\u201d, are beyond trauma or mental illness. I am wondering if it is possible to survive such conditions in real life. However, applying some psychological elements such as trauma to this book, it could be possible that the man\u2019s wife or the boy\u2019s mother developed some type of mental illness due to the horrible conditions of her life.<\/p>\n

\u00a0According to The Black Hole of Trauma<\/em> article, \u201cthe development of post traumatic stress disorder or PTSD, as a diagnosis has created an organized framework for understanding how people\u2019s biology, conceptions of the world, and personalities are inextricably intertwined and shaped by experience\u201d(p.4). The key words from this passage are biology, conceptions of the world and shaped by experience. From this perspective, it is safe to assume that she was emotionally weaker than the man or the boy. The three of them were subjected to the same life circumstances and conditions and she is the only one who developed a mental illness and succumbed to it. This fictionalized character has frightening parallels to reality. The article does not focus in suicide but rather the different symptoms, solutions types of therapies, and so on. However, most suicides are because of mental illness and PTSD is clearly a mental illness.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cShe was gone and the coldness of it was her final gift. She would do it with a flake of obsidian\u201d (p. 58), said the narrator of the Road. The wife of the man who was supposed to take care of the boy decided instead to give up by committing suicide. When I say \u201csupposed\u201d… Continue reading The man’s wife and PTSD<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[10],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/778"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=778"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/778\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=778"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=778"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=778"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}