Literary Sense-Making: American Vietnam Fiction

Abstract

Since 1941 the United States has been more-or-less continuously involved in a series of military conflicts around the world. The resulting public awareness of war has contributed to the production of an ever-growing number of fictional accounts that deal with war or war-like situations. One of the assumptions of this essay is that stories of war display essential cultural concepts, expectations and self-images more prominently than other kinds of fiction, as the extreme situation of war provides occasions for scrutinising and putting into words the individual and collective values in whose name the state demands that its citizens risk their lives for the common good. Thus, novels of war can be considered as fictional models of a nation’s (or people’s) ‘storifying of experience’, as acts of literary sense-making (or questioning) in response to historical problems of national importance.¹ The literary conventions employed by these texts in their attempt to understand a specific historical situation reveal specific cultural idiosyncrasies in plot patterns, motifs, symbol systems, and so on. If they have sufficient explanatory power, these models of literary sense-making persist as persuasive conventions, even in the face of political and historical change.²