by James Lowder
Like Arya, Theon has abandoned his old identity and reconstructed himself fully, though in his case, in a Condition Black identity, not a Condition Yellow one. Where Arya becomes a capable, savvy, and adaptive fighter, Theon sinks fully into self-pity, terror, and paralysis. He emerges from this morass as the stinking, haunted Reek, lickspittle and lackey to his torturer, the monster Ramsay, the Bastard of Bolton. When we are first introduced to Reek in A Dance with Dragons, he has fallen so low that he is eating rats. As the guards approach his cell, his only thought is: “If they catch me with it, they will take it away, and then they’ll tell, and Lord Ramsay will hurt me.”
Where Arya’s litany is one of empowerment—a hit list of her enemies—Theon’s is a reminder to adhere to a path of self-destruction: “Serve and obey and remember your name. Reek, Reek, it rhymes with meek” (A Dance with Dragons). Arya faces each new enemy and trauma with renewed determination. Through the chaos in the Red Keep, life on the streets of Flea Bottom, the rigors of Harrenhal, she continuously remakes herself to best face her current challenges and to prepare for the next. Theon has the opposite reaction to the flaying, the loss of his teeth, the false hope engendered by his escape from the Dreadfort and the horror of the subsequent hunt he endures, and the destruction of his former lover Kyra. Each blow leveled against him lowers him further into the identity of Reek.
Again, some may sympathize, arguing that the torture Theon endures would undo any man. Theon is broken physically to an extent from which he can never recover, subjected to agonies that would snap the strongest spines.
Few could stand up to torture of the kind Bolton inflicts upon Theon, and it leaves him with a grim choice between death or the loss of his identity. Condition Black becomes the framework he embraces to cling to life. I have met many service members returned from Iraq and Afghanistan missing limbs. One friend had been “double-tapped”: hit by an improvised explosive timed to detonate slightly after a primary charge, in a deliberate effort to strike at first responders to a blast. He is a jigsaw puzzle, his face and body crisscrossed with black lines. One eye is gone, his arm missing below the elbow. But his identity remains unscathed. The breaking of his body, the constant agony, the bitterness over the unfairness of the trauma he has suffered—these things have not touched the man he is inside. Theon’s reaction to torture and trauma may be the more likely outcome, but it is not the only possible one. There are men who would die before allowing themselves to become Reek, no matter what was done to them.
The Reek identity is the best example of a permanent Condition Black that I have ever encountered in fiction. The chilling scene where Ramsay forces Theon to abase himself and the false “Arya,” Jeyne Poole, embodies the depredations life in that bleak zone can subject a person to. It is the ultimate and most horrifying outcome of PTSD, the fate of a person utterly incapable of coping with the trauma he faces.
Theon Greyjoy’s plight nearly brought me to tears, because I have seen that transformation before, every bit as total and harrowing, until death seems a mercy in comparison.
Getting It Right
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder has been around for as long as mankind has experienced trauma, but the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are only now forcing it on to the national stage as a mental health issue requiring serious attention. As with all new fields of study, the initial attempts to define the parameters of the problem—to discover predictable, repeating, and therefore treatable behaviors and symptoms—are a lot of fumbling in the dark. Complex issues defy taxonomy. Things work a certain way, except when they don’t. The human mind is an incredibly intricate mechanism.
The Cooper Color Code is a limited, and perhaps even woefully inadequate, way to categorize reactions to trauma. It is designed to deal with immediate, rapidly evolving tactical situations. Yet it provides us with a surprisingly pertinent means to frame the problem of long-term PTSD. It becomes another tool we can use to discuss the issue, to start sketching out the parameters we must understand if we’re ever going to begin finding solutions. The Cooper Color Code is an analogy, a way of saying, “PTSD is like this.”
Ironically, fiction, in this case fantasy, becomes another tool in that toolbox, as Martin’s epic saga and his characters’ actions within it provide us with another analogy we can use to try to define coping mechanisms, to identify them as associated with response to trauma, and to begin to address the problems they present. The behaviors of Arya and Theon, as well as other characters in A Song of Ice and Fire, so closely reflect behaviors I have seen in real combatants returning from war, in real crisis responders dealing with the aftermath of their experiences, that it shouldn’t go unremarked. In this, Martin’s facility with character may be a useful and even powerful new angle from which to approach the problem, and his writing a window into the plight of those struggling in the shadow of PTSD.
MYKE COLE is the author of the military fantasy Shadow Ops series, the first novel of which, Control Point, is currently available from Ace. As a security contractor, government civilian and military officer, Myke Cole’s career has run the gamut from counterterrorism to cyber warfare to federal law enforcement. He’s done three tours in Iraq and was recalled to serve during the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. He also served as a Hurricane Duty Officer (HDO) during Hurricane Irene.
SUSAN VAUGHT
THE BRUTAL COST OF REDEMPTION IN WESTEROS
Or, What Moral Ambiguity?
IN HIS ESSAY “EPIC Pooh,” Michael Moorcock postulates that J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy barely rises above nursery-room prose that “tells you comforting lies.” Moorcock describes the epic as an anti-romance, laced with the author’s Christian belief system to the point that faith is substituted for artistic rigor. Tolkien’s peasants serve as a “bulwark against Chaos [. . .]. They don’t ask any questions of white men in grey clothing who somehow have a handle on what’s best for us.” James L. Sutter furthers this idea in his November 2011 guest essay at Suvudu entitled “The Gray Zone: Moral Ambiguity in Fantasy,” noting that The Lord of the Rings has a fairy-tale simplicity, drawing on good and evil archetypes so stark that all the characters can easily be sorted into the boring categories of obviously “good” or irrefutably “bad.”
Sutter raises George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire as a contrast, proclaiming that Martin demonstrates one antidote to the boring good/evil clarity of Tolkien, which is to “remove the boundaries altogether [. . .]. Few of his characters are unimpeachably good or irredeemably evil.” This description is right in line with those offered by other commentators. Heather Havrilesky, in her 2011 New York Times review of the HBO adaptation of Martin’s epic, terms the tale “hedonistic and bleak,” and hints that it embodies a nihilistic worldview. Sutter goes even further. He notes that the series has a “lack of moralistic signposts.” Like many readers and critics, he identifies the world of Westeros as a place best described as morally ambiguous.
This perception appears to arise from the fact that characters cannot easily be sorted into fixed categories of “good” or “evil” based on intentions, character traits, actions, alliances, or outcomes. Unlike the archetypal heroes and villains in Tolkien’s work, characters in Westeros are often damaged, flawed, and beset by overwhelming emotions or passions that twist their heroic intent. Outcomes seem to reward bad behavior and corrupt intentions, and to punish good behavior and even the purest of intentions. The linear high-fantasy path of do-good-and-win (after some frightening setbacks)/do-evil-and-fall (after a few seemingly large victories) is not present in Westeros. Characters are often without clear alignments, and even if they manage to align with seemingly good or evil poles, this does little to ensure success, failure, or even survival. Even more importantly, we have no single, omniscient, reliable narrator to count on for guidance in this shadowy landscape. Readers see the action in Westeros exclusively through the fragmented, contradictory perspectives of its inhabitants. Much as in real life, we relate to some of the point-of-view ch
aracters and find little in common with others. We love some, we hate some, and through the filters of our own emotional, cognitive, and social biases, we do not always do well judging whether or not they represent good or evil by the standards of the Seven Kingdoms.
And there are standards.
To the observations and criticisms citing the lack of clear definitions of good and evil, I say: What moral ambiguity?
The Ways of the World
Westeros is not built upon a shifting foundation of chaos. True, there is no clearly marked, brightly lit path to salvation. Yet characters face a painful retributive justice, born of moral absolutism, that lends reality and depth to the medieval society portrayed in the series.
To grasp the cosmology at play in Westeros, consideration must be given to the way its society defines sin and evil. Since there is no distant, satanic eye atop a tower spawning unthinking mobs of obviously violent minions, evil must have a more mundane manifestation, and that manifestation arises from the fundamental threat to existence in the Seven Kingdoms: interminable winter—Winter—and the creatures Winter brings. “Winter Is Coming” becomes a denotative and connotative statement of the society’s core value and needs. In a very literal sense, the words of the Stark motto are a reminder that Winter will come to Westeros, as it always has, and it will bring with it terror and death that transcend typical human experiences. The more subtle shadings of the statement imply that for society to survive, residents of Westeros must keep to older traditions of working together in peace, productivity, and respect, to plan for this devastation. Otherwise, they will all perish when the light vanishes, the snow starts to fall, and the dead things begin to shuffle and stomp across the countryside.
Characters who engage in murder, sadistic cruelty, malignant selfishness or narcissism, dishonorable and dishonest acts, and obsessions with relative frivolities such as political intrigue and playing the game of thrones transgress against not just individuals but society itself. Those who fail to understand that Winter is coming—who fail to recognize that they must put aside lesser concerns and any bad behavior that gets in the way of preserving the kingdom—represent evil in Westeros. They commit sins against the unity necessary to survive the coming darkness, either to such a level that they become irredeemable, or to lesser extents, with failure or refusal to comprehend the seriousness of their wrongdoings. There is no ambiguity in the fate of characters who cannot or will not choose a path of redemption. They suffer, and they die, often in a fashion that approaches ironic justice. Robb Stark, Catelyn Stark, and Joffrey Baratheon serve as examples of characters who face this fate.
In Westeros, as in the real world, there are few if any saints, or even adults, who do not sin at one level of severity or another. Only the very young seem to have claim to complete innocence and impunity. Those who violate the moral and actual laws of the land, but grasp the depth of their indiscretions and attempt to atone—those who seem to truly understand that Winter is coming, and everything that the words imply—serve as representatives of good in Westeros. These characters still walk a wicked road of atonement that can be staggering. There is no ambiguity for them, either. They will suffer. They will lose everything and be reduced to nothing, and they will have to find the strength to rebuild their identities, or die along the way and be heartlessly forgotten. Davos Seaworth, Sansa Stark, and Jaime Lannister appear to be struggling through such grueling journeys of redemption.
The Winter Path
Robb Stark, the young and newly proclaimed King in the North, does good in Westeros by establishing a measure of peace and unity amongst disparate groups when he gives his word that he will marry a daughter of Lord Walder Frey. He then breaks that promise by marrying his nursemaid, Jeyne Westerling. His reasons for marrying Jeyne are honorable, as he is attempting to protect her reputation after he takes her maidenhead; however, these reasons apply primarily to individual needs, namely Jeyne’s need for this protection and Robb’s need to avoid the guilt related to his sin of lust and how it might affect Jeyne in the future. As a citizen of Westeros, and especially as a man purporting to be a king, Robb fails to recognize the magnitude of his more serious sins: the tarnishing of his honor through his oathbreaking not just to the Freys but to the people of Westeros under his guidance and protection. By giving in to his own base desires and then betraying the Freys to assuage his own conscience, he shatters alliances and creates enmity that impairs cooperation in preparations for Winter’s approach. This increases the likelihood that many of Robb’s subjects—or perhaps most of them—will not survive. This sin is perhaps magnified by the fact that Robb is a Stark, and he has been hearing and saying the Stark motto his entire life.
Robb shows some level of recognition of his wrongs and has a plan to make amends to the Freys; however, he does not understand the level or depth of their offense at his betrayal. He makes a simplistic attempt to appease their anger by securing a marriage between one of Frey’s daughters and Edmure Tully, but he ends up a guest at the Freys’ Red Wedding. Robb and his men are butchered, and Robb’s corpse is desecrated with the head of Grey Wind, his direwolf, sewn onto its shoulders. The symbolism of this final insult seems to place Robb on par with animals who cannot control lust even when much more is at stake.
Catelyn Stark has many excellent qualities as a human being, including a loving nature, fierce loyalty, and keen intelligence. She also has difficulty forgiving, demonstrates a tendency to seek vengeance, and acts on impulse. When in an emotional state, Catelyn lashes out, without significant attention to the long-range consequences of her tantrums. She cannot see past her own need for retribution, and never truly acknowledges her own faults, to herself or to anyone else.
Catelyn’s list of wrongs begins to mount early in A Game of Thrones. She never finds it in her otherwise large heart to show Jon Snow, the bastard child in her care, any form of acceptance and cannot seem to forgive her husband for bringing the boy to live at Winterfell. Through her coldness to Jon, she exacts revenge on him for being in her life and makes an innocent child pay for her unhappiness. Her penchant toward both vengeance and rash, emotionally-driven action becomes more obvious when she erroneously arrests and imprisons Tyrion Lannister to avenge the assault on her son Brandon. Her capture of a Lannister endangers her husband, and ultimately her whole family—and the event becomes a catalyst for war. Despite living with and loving some of the Starks for most of her adult life, Catelyn dishonors their purpose as Wardens of the North. She pursues her own emotional satisfaction and commits an ultimate sin in Westeros by further dividing society and greatly damaging the chances that inhabitants can make themselves ready for Winter.
Catelyn’s penalties for her impulsive actions and her failure to understand her own faults are steep: the execution of her husband and the death (real and supposed) of her children. These losses do not spark understanding of how her rash choices led to disaster, and Catelyn does not embark on a path to redemption. In fact, prior to her death, she commits an emotion-laced atrocity, using Walder Frey’s intellectually impaired grandson Jinglebell as a hostage during the Red Wedding, then cutting his throat as Robb Stark dies. With this act, she further tarnishes her character and her soul. When she rises from death after three days in the river, she becomes Lady Stoneheart. This vengeance-obsessed incarnation makes physically manifest the coldness she showed Jon and the ugliness she demonstrated in murdering Jinglebell. Lady Stoneheart is hard and devoid of emotion, obsessed only with retribution against her perceived enemies. In death, Catelyn becomes little more than a scarred and merciless reflection of her former self. There is little ambiguity in the fate she suffers, as her body and mind are given wholly over to their darker nature.
If ever a literary character deserved penalty instead of redemption, Joffrey Baratheon would be the boy. Spoiled and indulged by emotionally absent parents, he enjoys bullying and torturing any creature he perceives to be beneath him in status—which encompasses most living things in Westeros. It would be fas
ter to list Joffrey’s positives than his negatives, since he has so few of them. In fact, only the Lannister good looks and a dash of superficial charm come to mind. He is narcissistic and devoid of the capacity to love. Not surprisingly, he has no inkling of his own weaknesses, and he does nothing but sow division amongst the people he swears to protect as first their crown prince, and then their king.
Early on in A Game of Thrones, Joffrey hires an assassin to complete the murder of Brandon Stark, a deed that is blamed on Tyrion Lannister. This deepens the growing enmity between House Stark and House Lannister. He then assaults Arya Stark and her friend Mycah, resulting in the execution of both Mycah and Sansa’s direwolf, Lady. Joffrey’s evils only multiply, and in short order, he has Sansa’s father beheaded while she watches. Thereafter, he forces her to look at her father’s impaled head and has her beaten by his Kingsguard for any perceived disobedience. In A Storm of Swords, he tosses Sansa away like rubbish and marries Margaery Tyrell to cement an alliance, all the while making it clear he will bed Sansa any time and with any measure of cruelty he chooses. At the pinnacle of his power, when he believes he is above everyone at his court and the laws of his own land, Joffrey chokes to death, poisoned at his own wedding feast. His biological parents scarcely mourn his passing, choosing instead to copulate in front of his corpse when they are reunited after a separation.
While Joffrey Baratheon is an obvious candidate for such a final humbling by the retributive justice that occurs in Westeros, Robb Stark and Catelyn Stark faced similar ultimate punishments for betraying their honor and acting in ways that further divide an already chaotic and crippled society. Westeros must heal itself and cooperate to survive its long and deadly trial of snow, darkness, and the walking dead. Winter is coming, and these three characters failed to honor this most fundamental and essential reality of their world, closing off the possibility of their own salvation.