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.