Sudden Irrelevant Thought

[moon_custafer]

sovay , when you posted a couple of years ago about The Last Flight (1931) you mentioned the character with narcolepsy. It just occurred to me that given the setting, he may not have PTSD like the other fliers – he’s probably got encephalitis lethargica. He’s a bit older than most who fell victim to it, but only by, what, five years?

Comments

[sovay]

It just occurred to me that given the setting, he may not have PTSD like the other fliers – he’s probably got encephalitis lethargica.

I think this is a neat interpretation, but barring word of God from John Monk Saunders I don't think it's supported by the script, which is pretty clear about linking Francis' condition with his war trauma—he has other physical injuries after he's released from hospital at the start of the story, suggesting that whatever's wrong with him is a combination of PTSD and probably brain damage. As Bill explains cheerfully to Shep and Cary, "We crashed." He zones out through conversations, but at real danger he snaps awake, combat-ready, and it turns out his gunner's reflexes haven't gone anywhere.

[moon_custafer]

You’re probably right – I doubt Saunders would have made the link at the time. How well was the sleeping-sickness pandemic known to the general public – I’m under the impression medical specialists realized they were seeing more cases, but that the affected percentage of the population was so low the average person wouldn’t have noticed; then, of course, they eventually all ended up as the patients in “Awakenings” decades later.

I did notice, re-reading your description and the subsequent comments thread, that Francis swings between narcolepsy and hypervigilance, though I don’t know enough about neurology to tell if that proves or disproves anything. Without going into too much detail, I have long experience with one single individual who suffers from a raft of mental/possibly neurological problems we’re still trying to figure out, and one thing I noticed very early on is that when he’s in sleepwalking mode, his reflexes and accuracy are much, much better than when he’s fully conscious.

[sovay]

You’re probably right – I doubt Saunders would have made the link at the time.

I would also be more inclined to accept a case of encephalitis lethargica camouflaged by PTSD in a memoir as opposed to a fictional story explicitly about the mental-emotional-physical aftermath of war, where much of the point seems to be that there's no single monomythic way to be fucked up from World War I: the flyers all took different damage and it comes out differently in all of them, except for the way they all drink and share the same surreal sense of humor. The influenza pandemic had happened in the background of this story, too, but we don't hear about it. It wasn't what Saunders was interested, in the same way he was visibly, obsessively haunted by the costs of war and the crumple zone of heroism, in exploring.

How well was the sleeping-sickness pandemic known to the general public

I don't know. I mostly know about individual cases—Ralph Richardson's first wife, Muriel "Kit" Hewitt, caught it in 1927 and died of it in 1942, and it is not clear to me that it was correctly diagnosed for some time. She experienced a progressive decline instead of an Awakenings-style lights-out, so it was confused initially with other nervous disorders; she never did fall into a coma. She died of rapidly worsening complications of what was called at the time post-encephalitis, but she had been able to visit her husband in hospital (motorcycle crack-up) earlier that same year. She was part of the very last wave of the epidemic. They knew that by the time she died.

Without going into too much detail, I have long experience with one single individual who suffers from a raft of mental/possibly neurological problems we’re still trying to figure out, and one thing I noticed very early on is that when he’s in sleepwalking mode, his reflexes and accuracy are much, much better than when he’s fully conscious.

Understood. Francis as written actually does seem to wake up rather than expertly autopilot, just not on anything that looks like a normal sleep-wake cycle. I can't get any closer to a diagnosis for him than "PTSD and probably brain-damage" and both of those would have been covered by "shell-shock" at the time.

I have totally coincidentally just played a song with the recurring chorus: "But the dream is awake and we know it / So we win or we wait / We wait."

[monanotlisa]

Holy random diagnosis, Batman! ;)