A Soldier’s War

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Up until World War I “descriptions of war in America are confined primarily to generals’ account . . . leaving much of the war’s confusion and chaos to the imagination” (Smith 11). American writers rarely considered war as a viable literary subject, until Stephen Crane’s civil war novel, The Red Badge of Courage. Despite Crane having never been in a war zone his publication is considered among the first to capture the potential of the battlefield as a literary backdrop. Further developing the war novel genre, Ernest Hemingway adds what Smith describes as a “journalistic style” to a more modern skeptical outlook on war. Just as Hemingway’s work provides graphic detail of World War I, Tim O’Brien’s novels “[have] become the Vietnam literature of record . . . [in] contemporary war fiction” (Smith 12). Like Hemingway,1 O’Brien takes on a journalistic approach to his novels. Narrating with his typical method of fragmented stream-of-consciousness, Tim O’Brien recalls his past experiences as a soldier and creates a meta-fiction that illustrates the Vietnam War as a senseless paradox.

Fusing physical incident and creative writing, O’Brien establishes his novel in the form of a meta-fiction. The disparity is O’Brien’s first tool in developing his conclusions about the immense contradictions of the Vietnam War.2 For the purposes of this literary analysis the term meta-fiction indicates the blending of factual occurrence and fictitious detail. As defined by Patricia Waugh, meta-fiction is “a fictional writing which self-consciously . . . draws attention to its status as [fiction] in order to [examine] the relationship between fiction and reality” (Waugh 2). In this manner, meta-fiction allows an author to explore a particular event from mu...

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