Chapter 25 - The Veteran

Summary

This chapter examines the notion of home-shock (as opposed to shell-shock) in five works of American fiction from the 1920s. Each work contains a veteran tortured not by war but by the circumstances of his homecoming. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby returns from his heroic overseas service to a nation that seems content to let him starve, the pivotal moment in his transformation from earnest student of self-help to criminal bootlegger. Harold Krebs, the protagonist of Ernest Hemingway’s “Soldier’s Home,” is infantilized by his mother and ignored by his community, which neither understands nor respects his combat experience. Bayard Sartoris and Henry Winston—former wartime aviators featured in, respectively, William Faulkner’s Flags in the Dust and Elliott White Springs’s Leave Me with a Smile—each suffer from paralyzing survivor’s guilt, a malady that no one in their Southern settings is equipped to treat. For African-American protagonists, subject to racial violence and oppression, home-shock is even more intense, as illustrated by the ironic fate visited upon Frederick Taylor, the doleful hero of Claude McKay’s “The Soldier’s Return,” set in a small Georgia town. This former soldier winds up on a chain gang after ignoring an edict that prohibits black veterans from wearing their uniforms in public.