The World Played Chess

Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses depictions of drug and alcohol misuse, post-traumatic stress disorder, and wartime atrocities that feature in the source text.

The World Played Chess concerns the coming of age of the three main characters.

William’s coming of age is abrupt, almost instantaneous, occurring, as it does, overnight, with his first direct experience of war. Forced into a premature adulthood, the war in Vietnam robs William of his childhood and dehumanizes him into a killer. He learns at an early age how to value his mortality, but his experiences in the war also alienate him from his life in the United States. In this way, William’s experience is representative of an entire generation of young men who participated in a conflict in which they themselves had no direct stake and who returned home to face the stigma of having been veterans in an unpopular war. Like William, the many men who experienced PTSD after the war found no sympathy or understanding for a mental health condition that as yet had not been identified as such. Considered unstable and violent, such men were often shunned, and some used drugs and alcohol to cope with their ongoing trauma. In effect, then, the Vietnam War prevented anything like the process of coming of age, and only when—and if—veterans with trauma could eventually find help nearly a decade after the war was over and PTSD was recognized for what it is could they begin the belated growth into responsibility and humanity, as William himself does. When Vincent first meets him in the summer of 1979, however, that journey has not yet begun for William. Only when he finds a sympathetic, unjudgmental ear in the young Vincent can William find support in his coming-of-age story and begin to move forward with his life.

Just as Vincent helps William grow into the person he could be (albeit this help is unwitting), so William helps Vincent mature during the summer after he graduates from high school. Although William can be misguided when he sets out to teach life lessons—as in the incident with the woman in the car—he does convey through his stories about Vietnam the reality of mortality and the value of life, which teenage boys hardly consider. Nor has Vincent up to this point. At first, he wants to fit in with the men on the construction site and continue to party with his friends. But being a happy-go-lucky partier is at odds with the responsibility that comes with adulthood, and as Vincent matures over the summer and comes to take pleasure in hard work, he begins letting go of his youthful friendships and getting closer to William. In the process, he sees the effects of the Vietnam War on this veteran, who misuses drugs and alcohol and can even become violent at times, yet Vincent admires William’s ability to survive and recognizes life lessons in William’s experiences. William fought in a war he didn’t believe in, so Vincent decides to stop getting into fights he doesn’t believe in just because he thinks getting in a fight makes for a good “manly” story. Essentially, Vincent learns that performative masculinity is destructive.

Beau’s coming-of-age story resembles that of his father—and to that extent differs profoundly from William’s. Although Vincent and Beau do have a brush with mortality, this occurs due to the harmfulness of drunk driving, not the exigencies of war. For Beau, however, the loss of his best friend in such an accident is profoundly traumatic (and suggests in hindsight why William was advised not to make friends with his fellow soldiers in Vietnam). He feels as though he loses part of himself in that accident and could very well become trapped in a cycle of survivor’s guilt—again, nothing like William’s, but still enough to prevent him from developing his own identity and shaping his own future. As Vincent passes on the life lessons that he learned from William to his son, he furthers the positive possibilities of coming of age that emerge from William’s tragic story.