Beyond the Wall: Exploring George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, From A Game of Thrones to A Dance with Drago (13 page)

Arya’s trauma rips her world away. Cast out on the streets of Flea Bottom, she recreates herself as capable, warlike, alert. Surrounded by death, she dedicates herself to its study; murdering, impulsively at first with the King’s Landing stable boy, then deliberately and with decreasing difficulty, first through Jaqen H’ghar, and later by her own hands and Nymeria’s teeth. Her
raison d’etre
, which had once been balancing her adventurous ways with the traditions of her home and family, is replaced by her chanted prayer: the list of names of the victims she swears to avenge herself upon: “‘Ser Gregor,’ she’d whisper to her stone pillow. [. . .] ‘Ser Amory, Ser Ilyn, Ser Meryn, King Joffrey, Queen Cersei.’” (
A Clash of Kings
).

Arya emerges from the crucible of her trauma horribly changed. Even by the harsh standards of Westeros, her childhood has been ripped away. She is shaken to her roots.

Still, the coping mechanisms she develops to grapple with PTSD
strengthen
her. She is more capable and powerful than she was before the incidents that transformed her. By the close of
A Dance with Dragons
, she is well on the path of establishing herself as a dedicated and able professional assassin: street-smart, intuitive, remorseless, and deadly.

Condition Yellow has become integrated into Arya’s character. She is enfranchised: no less traumatized for the transformation, but no weaker either.

“Only a fool humbles himself when the world is so full of men eager to do that job for him.”

—A C
LASH OF
K
INGS
    

Those in Condition Black generally engage coping mechanisms that most external viewers would perceive as negative. Those who move into permanent Condition Black as a result of PTSD are actively self-destructive, usually in one of two ways. Some freeze up, go catatonic, and fail to react to future traumatic events, essentially letting the world have its way with them. Alternately, those in Condition Black may actively engage in self-destruction through means of compulsive behavior such as drug, alcohol, or sex addiction. Detached from a world that has come to terrify them, they may engage in suicidal levels of risk-taking or push away loved ones who try to help.

Theon Greyjoy, on the surface, has a similar upbringing to Arya’s, with its attached illusions of safety. But there is one key difference: Theon lives as a hostage—but ostensibly a member—of the Stark family in exchange for the good behavior of his own kinsmen, the Greyjoys of the Iron Isles.

While Arya is coaxed into Condition Yellow by a wary and loving family, Theon is ripped from his warlike kin and thrust into a setting that is soft by comparison. The Starks are certainly warlike, but life in Winterfell is a far cry from life on the Iron Isles, where every aspect of existence from birth on is imbued with the trappings of war. Yet Theon is mistrusted by the people who hold him hostage. He is given no succor, no gentle coaxing into preparedness against the slings and arrows of life. He lacks the cushion of a gift like Needle and a patient and gentle fencing master. For Theon, the slide to Condition Black begins early.

Theon’s life in Winterfell is framed by constant reminders that he lives at the mercy of his captors, contingent upon the good behavior of his own clan. He is treated even worse than the bastard Jon Snow, who lacks even his noble blood. Robb Stark reinforces his outcast status after Theon bravely saves Bran’s life. “Jon always said you were an ass, Greyjoy,” Robb says of Theon’s decision to use his bow to fell Bran’s assailant, even though the shot was perfect and the boy was unharmed. “I ought to chain you up in the yard and let Bran take a few practice shots at
you
” (
A Game of Thrones
).

The signs of Condition Black manifest early in Theon’s narrative. Many who suffer from PTSD engage in addictive, self-destructive behavior. Martin represents this with sex, in Greyjoy’s case, painting him as a whoremonger of some renown. Like an addict, Greyjoy uses sex not so much as a source of pleasure but to assuage a compulsion. He recalls tumbling the miller’s wife “a time or two” in
A Clash of Kings
and that there was “nothing special” about her, displaying a lack of satisfaction in the act. Sex also appears to be a way for Theon to grasp some shred of personal power when, as a hostage, so much has been stripped from him. This is reflected in the adulterous nature of some of Theon’s conquests, and in the way he takes pleasure in demeaning his former paramours, such as Kyra. After embarrassing her publicly, he confides to Robb Stark, “She squirms like a weasel in bed, but say a word to her on the street, and she blushes pink as a maid” (
A Game of Thrones
). He then tries to launch into a detailed tale of a sexual encounter before Robb cuts him off.

The self-destructive nature of Greyjoy’s sex addiction is further expanded on when his sister Asha seduces him as a means to humiliate him. When Theon is sent on embassy to his former home, he doesn’t recognize his sister, and so attempts to court her. Asha, who recognizes Theon and his weakness, plays along and only later reveals herself as his sister. Her deceit is also the final blow in a string of rejections by his own family, rebuffs that leave him utterly adrift: his Ironborn kin declare him soft and weak from too many years in Winterfell. They despise him. The Starks, in turn, have shown they will never fully trust him and are all too willing to use him for their own political ends. Ned Stark reminds readers of this when he warns his wife that a close watch be kept on Theon because, “If there is war, we shall have sore need of his father’s fleet” (
A Game of Thrones
). The goal is not to keep him safe, but to keep him secure as a bargaining chip.

After his rejection by his biological family, Greyjoy’s self-destructive impulses spill their banks. Some may argue that Theon’s seizure of Winterfell is the bold action of a man intent on standing alone and proving his worth to a family that judges men by their feats of arms. I see it more as the spiteful lashing out of a child wounded by everyone around him, all those he loves and might love. This is classic Condition Black: Theon engages in highly risky behavior, flailing in reaction to trauma he cannot handle. Arya’s choices are deliberate, empowered. Theon’s are reactive, driven by his inability to reconcile the real world with the one he thought he’d lived in.

Theon mostly vanishes from
A Storm of Swords
and
A Feast for Crows
, though there are some hints as to what may become of him when a piece of his skin is delivered to Catelyn Stark at the Red Wedding. This gruesome token is an indication of what is occurring offstage: Theon’s shift into Condition Black becoming permanent under the continuous torture he is suffering at the hands of Ramsay Bolton. When Theon reappears in
A Dance with Dragons
, his transformation is complete.

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.

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.