World War I occurred between July 1914 and November 1918. The narrator was 13 when the war ended, and the national climate surrounding the war indirectly informed his formative years and his actions during that time. The story intertwines the narrator’s feelings of fear, pride, shame, and guilt to parallel the social atmosphere of his rural North Carolina community. By 1918, North Carolinians had served in all major battles at the Western Front, resulting in thousands of injured and killed soldiers. Although the narrator does not fully understand that the “strange names” his family discusses are battle locations, his mother’s prayers for a slain neighborhood boy situate the war within reach of the Armstrong family. The social expectations of the period shape the narrator’s reactions to his and Doodle’s “failures.”

The narrator attributes his pride and shame as the motivating factors to teach Doodle to walk and the inspiration for his attempts to train Doodle in athletic pursuits: “They did not know that I did it for myself; that pride, whose slave I was, spoke to me louder than all their voices, and that Doodle walked only because I was ashamed of having a crippled brother” (50).