Basic Training Pavlo Hummel, Long Way Gone Ishmael Beah (Essay Sample)

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Argumentative Essay
Trauma affects people differently depending on different aspects regarding the intensity of the incidence and the individuals involved. According to Rabe (64), disasters and traumatic events provide survivors with difficult conditions that can either break or make them defining how they may live the rest of their lives (Huong 88). One of the most authentic areas where stress disorders have been associated particularly with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is in the war in Vietnam where most soldiers who participated in this war struggled with many stress related conditions way after the war. This paper provides an argumentative analysis of PTSD as viewed from the perspective of soldiers who participated in the Vietnamese war and how this condition affects personality. In so doing, the paper will rely on The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel by David Rabe, Novel without a Name by Duong Thu Huong, and A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah.
In order to have a clearer understanding of the concept of personality and how different schools of thought consider it among people, it is appropriate to understand exactly what it refers to. In psychological circles, personality is defined as the consistency in a person’s way of being. In other words, it is understood as the long-term consistency in the way people perceive, things, think, act and react as individuals (Aziz 156). In a summarized way, it is the organized pattern of thought and feeling and behavior (Strobel, Tumasjan & Spцrrle 46). This does not mean repeated actions being repeated by someone over and over again as is the case with say, compulsive hand washing but rather the overall patters, inclinations, and tendencies that can be seen about someone. As put by Ahmetoglu & Chamorro-Premuzic (28) one’s personality is their genera predictability in their thought patterns, emotional patterns, and behavioral patterns. It is this specific definition that Strobel, Tumasjan & Spцrrle used in providing the following elaboration:
Your personality style is your organizing principle. It propels you on your life path. It represents the orderly arrangement of all your attributes, thoughts, feelings, attitudes, behaviors, and coping mechanisms. It is the distinctive pattern of your psychological functioning – the way you think, feel, and behavior – that makes you definitely you (Strobel, Tumasjan & Spцrrle 48).
This elaborate definition is important in bringing out the clarity between personality and conditional behavior where personality is the consistent pattern of an individual and the way this pattern affects their daily behavior where as conditional behavior is trained tendencies that do not necessarily reflect one’s personality or character (Ahmetoglu & Chamorro-Premuzic 98).
The elaborate definition of personality then opens the way for different ways that are used by personality theorists to define it. The two attributes of personality that are commonly used are one’s temperament and one’s character which are now discussed hereinafter.
In the memoir by Ismael Beah under the name, A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, a firsthand account of Beah’s time as a child soldier during the civil war in Sierra Leon in the 1990s. In the account, Beah recounts how rebels attacked his village effectively separating him from his immediate family and after that he was forced to join militia groups that forced him into use guns and drugs at the tender age of 13 years (Beah 98). It is a life that Beah lived for three horrible years experiencing horrific acts of atrocities and violence that would change him forever and the intervention of UNICEF that rescued him from the militia army and put him into a rehabilitation center at the age of 16 was God-sent (Beah 76).
This is a similar experience that is carried in David Rabe’s play, The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel which was written as a Vietnamese War Trilogy. It recounts the story of Hummel who is a troubled soldier that struggles relating with his team and even sergeant within the United States Army (Rabe 121). He is not trusted by anyone in his troop and is guided by Ardell who acts in the book as Hummel’s conscience and a Greek chorus-like figure (Rabe 101). He struggles with his personality and even under very gothic injury spells, he refuses to give up at some point as he is determined to be a soldier and this decision not to take a break when he is injured to go back home eventually proves fatal for him.
In the same way, Novel without a Name by Duong Thu Huong, tells the story of a young platoon commander called Quan, struggling to find his identity in the confusion of the last days of the Vietnam War. Quan had joined the army earlier on with his childhood friends, Bien and Luong and each of them represents a different response to the search for identity in the chaos of the war that is ongoing throughout the story (Huong 65). When the novel opens, Luong has risen in ranks to become of one of the leaders of the platoons and later becomes an officer at division headquarters and deputy commander. In the process of his path through the ranks, Luong disseminates Party ideology in the process finding a space for himself in the bureaucracy of war (Huong 78). As opposed to Luong and Quan, Bien never manages to rise in ranks above the rank of a sergeant and the traumas of the war lead him to develop mental illness in the process becoming imprisoned as a mental lunatic (Huong 98).
According to Heatherton & Weinberger (291), temperament is a term that is used to refer to the different aspects of someone’s personality such as extroversion or introversion which are considered to be inborn attributes that are not learnt in the course of one’s life (Heatherton & Weinberger 76). Given the extensive nature of this concept, there have been many classificatory schemes that have been developed and furthered to create better understanding of the concept temperament as an attribute of personality but to date, none of these categories and theories has achieved universal consensus (Heatherton & Weinberger 178). According to literature, the history of human temperament as an attribute of personality is a concept that stems from what was called the theory of The Four Humours with their corresponding Four Temperaments (Strobel, Tumasjan & Spцrrle 188). In this earlier understanding, temperament was considered to be determined through specific behavior patterns that are easy to detect and measure especially during one’s childhood. In the quest to quantify and measure temperamental attributes, the common factors that are tested include activity, irritability, and frequency of smiling (Heatherton & Weinberger 228). As is evidenced by these factors, it is clear that measuring these attributes is something that does not come easily among scientists and theorists who work on understanding temperaments and personalities.
The other reason that is given for the difficult in determining empirical aspects of one’s temperament is the fact that temperament is largely associated with biological factors that are equally difficult to measure and determine. Among the many theorists that have discussed this highly opinionated concept is Thomas and Chess who developed a general description of different attributes that define temperaments and gave nine temperamental traits as a guide in understanding people’s personalities. These characteristics, although not exhaustive, are among the few guidelines that enjoy fairly universal appreciation and acclaim. They are as follows:
Activity – this trait is used to refer to one’s physical energy that can be determined by the movements one has and whether they have a relaxing approach to life (Heatherton & Weinberger 19). When the research was done on children, it would be determined by whether the child had the tendency to stay in one place for long, say, when in class or whether they were constantly moving from one place to another (Heatherton & Weinberger 187). The trait can also be used to refer to mental activity that can be seen in such acts as deep thinking or reading (Strobel, Tumasjan & Spцrrle 321).
Regularity – this trait that is also referred to as rhythmicity refers to one’s level of predictability in their biological functioning. These functions may include waking up, bowel movements, becoming tired, and eating routines and sleeping habits among others (Strobel, Tumasjan & Spцrrle 69).
Initial reaction – this temperamental trait is also called withdrawal and refers to how a person responds to new people and environments – whether such responses are positive or negative (Strobel, Tumasjan & Spцrrle 99).
Adaptability – this temperamental trait refers to the length of time taken for one to adjust to new environments or situations and the ease with which the change happens (Aziz 45).
Intensity – this temperamental attribute refers to the energy with which a person responds to a situation of their environment.
Mood – this temperamental attribute refers to someone’s general tendency towards an unhappy or a happy demeanor in the way they deal with people. It indicates how one portrays their emotions and reactions to different people, scenarios, and environments (Aziz 78)...