Editing Captain America (section)

===Personality and motivations===
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 |quote  = "Rogers' transformation into Captain America is underwritten by the military. But, perhaps haunted by his own roots in powerlessness, he is a dissident just as likely to be feuding with his superiors in civilian and military governance as he is to be fighting with the supervillain Red Skull. [...] He is 'a man out of time,' a walking emblem of [[Greatest Generation|greatest-generation]] propaganda brought to life in this splintered postmodern time."
 |author = – [[Ta-Nehisi Coates]]<ref name="CoatesAtlantic"/>
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Steve Rogers' personality has shifted across his editorial history, a fact that media scholar J. Richard Stevens sees as a natural consequence of the character being written and re-interpreted by many writers over the span of multiple decades. However, Stevens identifies two aspects of the character's personality that have remained consistent across expressions: his "uncompromising purity" and "his ability to judge the character in others".{{Sfn|Stevens|2015|p=277}} Early Captain America stories typically paid little attention to Rogers' civilian identity; in his 1970 book ''[[The Steranko History of Comics]]'', Jim Steranko notes that the character was often criticized for being two-dimensional as a result. He argues that this was an intentional device, writing that these critics "failed to grasp the true implication of his being. Steve Rogers never existed, except perhaps as an abstract device for the convenience of storytelling. Captain America was not an embodiment of human characteristics but a pure idea."{{sfn|Steranko|1970|p=51}}

Following the character's return to comics in the 1960s, many stories gave increased focus to Rogers' civilian identity, particularly his struggles as a "man out of time" attempting to adjust to the modern era.{{sfn|Stevens|2015|p=89}} Often, stories depict a brooding or melancholic Rogers as he faces both a physical struggle as Captain America, and an ideological struggle as Steve Rogers to reconcile his social values with modern times.{{sfn|Stevens|2015|p=91}} The character is frequently conflicted by  his World War II-era "good war" morality being challenged and made anachronistic by the compromising demands of the post-war era.{{sfn|Stevens|2015|p=91}}{{sfn|Dittmer|2012|p=100}}

Prior to Bucky Barnes' return to comics in the 2000s, many Captain America stories centered on Rogers' sense of guilt over Barnes' death. Culture scholar Robert G. Weiner argues that these stories mirror the [[post-traumatic stress disorder]] and [[survivor guilt]] held by many war veterans, and that this trauma distinguishes the character from other well-known superheroes such as [[Batman]] and [[Spider-Man]]: while those characters became heroes because of a traumatic incident, Rogers carries on as a hero in spite of a traumatic incident, with Weiner asserting that this reinforces the nobility of the character.{{sfn|Weiner|2009|p=100}}