"In war you lose your sense of the definite, hence your sense of truth itself, and therefore it's safe to say that in a true war story nothing is ever absolutely true. Often in a true war story there is not even a point, or else the point doesn't hit you until at least 20 years later, in your sleep, and you wake up and shake your wife and start telling the story to her, except when you've gotten to the end you've forgotten the point again" (O'Brien, 276). This quotation illustrates the fact that the idiosyncrasy that has replaced the void created within the author's identity is one of distortion, in which truth and clarity are replaced by uncertainty and ambiguity. This point is also underscored by Stout's essay, as the following quotation in which Seth emphasizes his inability to relate to people due to his disassociation, largely suggests. "…I can't tell you what's going on. I'd really like to tell you but I can't" (Stout, 397). Seth's inability to tell Stout, his psychotherapist, what his own perceptions and thoughts are is due to the fact that they lack a sense of the definite, of the truth that is fairly germane to reality. A significant portion of his identity is at variance with that of a normal person's because it has been replaced by an idiosyncratic tendency in which uncertainty and ambiguity reigns instead. Such uncertainty is alluded to within Faludi's essay as well, and is probably most typified by the Citadel attorney who fought long and hard to keep Shannon Faulkner from entering the school. As previously mentioned, the...

The lawyer's inability to discern the true fact that women are not that different from men is underscored by the following quotation. "To Patterson, this was a triumphant moment…he had forced the government's witness to admit that a woman like Shannon Faulkner would have to be a mannish aberration from her gender. But in fact, Astin's testimony expressed the precise point that the plaintiff's side had been trying to make all along, and that the Citadel resisted: that the sexes were, in the end, not all that different" (Faludi, 95). The Citadel "resisted" this point because of the institutionalized trauma that is prevalent there and the fear associated with it, which allowed it to obfuscate a fairly simple point. Due to the idiosyncrasy found within trauma victims in which ambiguity replaces fear, the institution as a whole could not grasp this simplicity.
Fear causes a void to be created within victims of trauma that is filled by an idiosyncrasy. Further analysis of this idiosyncrasy reveals that no matter what the outward manifestation of it -- whether it is playing with a toy during war or incurring chronic disassociation -- appears as, internally there is an aberration of truth and a distorted sense of ambiguity that replaces…