Masters Theses

Date of Award

8-2003

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts

Major

English

Major Professor

Allen Dunn

Abstract

This study examines Aftermath Vietnam War literature-- literature where the bulk of the text is set in the United States after the Fall of Saigon (1975). Discussion of the following texts appear in the work: Larry Heinemann's Paco's Story, Bobbie Ann Mason's In Country, and Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried. I consider how survival, repetition and memorial figure as ways to articulate what happens to the individual and community during and after such traumatic confrontations as the Vietnam War. Veterans bring home elements of their battlefield experiences ambiguity, disorientation and being "bunkered-in." This creates an alienated existence that spreads to the larger community. In addition to alienation, compulsive repetition becomes a systematic attempt to find meaning and origin-to somehow capture the traumatic moment. Trauma cannot be fully experienced; the void is a necessary part of trauma, and it is that void that both alludes and obliges representation. Therefore, compulsive repetition guides us toward, at a minimum, these purposes: bearing witness to horrors of the war, condemning the immorality of war, implicating the larger community's participation in war, remember the dead, and beginning to repair the damaged psyche. This is clearly why memorial is so important. The way we represent war to the community must not be a false representation. False representations include strict adherence to chronology, linearity, closure, and the myth heroism.

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