Nostalgia In The Great War By Katherine Feo

Nostalgia and the yearning to go back to “better times” in a way motivates the idea of covering the wounded present. Speaking on the Great War, Katherine Feo’s article; “Invisibility: Memory, Masks, and Masculinities in the Great War” asserts that looking at the past played a big role in creating a mask for the soldiers who came back with wounds on their faces. Feo writes “As fundamental uncanny objects, the mask were invented to cover the shocking reminder of violence apparent in disfigurement, and attempt to recreate a familiar, pre-war face in an unachievable realistic, and so obviously artificial way” (18). Seeing that the idea in mind was to make the soldiers visage look how it did before the injury and ultimately before the war, such
Toby’s Room not only presents a literary theme about nostalgia, but it also creates a clear representation of how memory works through Elinor and her proceedings to go to the past. Feo, in her article, states that such processes were evident when creating the masks for the wounded soldiers, whose appearance of the past reverberated to the bigger society. Or as did Fussell in his gathering of information of how troops out in the battlefield recited plays that took them back to a time that was much easier than the one they were experiencing. Moreover, the analyzation of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow and how Brigadier Ernest Pudding, using the memory of the Great War, constructed a reality that otherwise would be troubling given that it was the Second World War he was experiencing. In addition, Fussell declares that Pudding, through his actions was building his present that was being guided and constructed by his conception of the past, which was produced by nostalgia. Hindsight ultimately helps with the understanding of the present, but also engenders the notion of escaping it by constructing an experience already