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Septimus and PTSD

  Septimus Warren Smith fought in World War I, and didn’t come out unscathed. While he suffered no physical scars from his time in the trenches, he did come out with subconscious lessons learned that hurt his own wellbeing in the long run. One of these important lessons he learned is that he should not feel. While he was in the war, he became great friends (one might even say lovers, it is ambiguous) with his officer Evans. However, right before the war ended, Evans was killed, and Septimus’ best friend was no more. When your average person sees your best friend, with whom you have struggled through horrors with, die in front of you, they feel sad, mortified, etc. etc. However, Septimus felt nothing at all (Woolf 84-85). This absence of emotion led him to marry his wife Rezia, and eventually drove him into a madness that ended in him killing himself (Woolf 146). Septimus’ story is depicting a disorder called Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) or, as it was called at the time the...
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Is Howie Neurodivergent?

  Howie shows signs of being autistic, such as sensory stims, sometimes having an inability to judge appropriate conversation topics, and an unwillingness for change. On page 12, Howie’s foot “slipped from the untied shoe and sought out the texture of the carpeting[,] … enjoying the slippage of the inner surface of the sock against the underside”. Howie is rubbing his socked foot against the carpet, which is causing his foot to rub against the sock. Rubbing against unique textures is a kind of stimming, or sensory seeking, that autistic people experience. In Howie’s case, he is seeking the sensation of the woven texture of the sock sliding against his skin. In the footnote on page 61, Howie talks about his first conversation with Bob Leary. This conversation has an interesting subject, being “the decreasing margins in the now mature copying-machine business, and the use of air suction as an element of the paper-feed mechanism that nobody could have foretold”. This is an odd topic o...
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