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In the Nunnally Johnson-directed film version of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1956), the protagonist, Tom Rath, bemusedly remarks on the sublime absurdity of his postwar existence saying, "One day a man's catching the 8:26, and then suddenly he's killing people. Then a few weeks later he's catching the 8:26 again." Rath, who killed at least seventeen men in the war, including-in a terrible accident-his best friend (he suspects he killed more, but cannot be sure), is genuinely perplexed by the way things are. It is clear, too, that all these years after the war he is not handling reintegration into life at home well. He struggles constantly with vivid daydreams of his war experiences. At work, others hesitate to approach him because he appears preoccupied; unbeknownst to others he is, in fact, distracted by recurring wartime memories. At home in the evenings, he is distant; he drinks too much; he looks off aimlessly as he performs rote physical activities like drying the dishes; or, he stares at the television screen in the dark after he has shooed his children off to sleep.
In the film, Gregory Peck plays Rath as a steady family man-anxious about things he is supposed to be anxious about, sure-but, one suspects there is more, that his monotone speech and measured movements bely the reality that a kaleidoscope of trauma-related distractions swirls constantly through his mind. He obviously suffers from what medical experts of the time called "war-related neurosis," or, what we might call post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) today.
About 1950s fiction and trauma-in the decade's "suspiciously impeccable" short stories in particular-Elizabeth Wheeler writes:
Like the decade itself, fifties short stories have a smooth and polished surface belying their stressful underpinnings. The smoothness of fifties discourse reflects the psychic numbing that often accompanies post-traumatic stress disorder. We have to read underneath the surface to find postwar shock in structures of flashback and denial (48).
Wheeler, here, has two specific stories in mind, Hisaye Yamamoto's "Wilshire Bus" (1950) and John Cheever's "The Country Husband" (1954), when she writes:
These stories do not primarily concern themselves with the trauma of World War II or the shock of postwar transition. Rather, they encapsulate the trauma into flashbacks, displace its truths from...