'There it is': Writing violence in three modern American combat novels

My dissertation, "There It Is": Writing Violence in Three Modern American Combat Novels, focuses on the unusual representation of violence in James Jones' The Thin Red Line (1962), a World War II novel; Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian (1985), a Western set in the immediate aftermath of the Mexican War; and Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried (1990), a collection of interconnected stories about Vietnam that effectively function as a novel. During the Vietnam War, soldiers who were confronted with the dumbfounding effects of an unnamable violence would simply say, "There it is." With this terse remark, they expressed both a belief that something of compelling violence had happened, and a conviction that the content of what they had witnessed could not, or ought not, be assimilated. Explanations or conclusions created by assimilating the hard facts of violence within an ethical, political, or even aesthetic system would do a certain violence to violence itself. So they refrained from saying more.;My dissertation analyzes three American war novels in which this belief and this conviction together exist as a narrative premise. Each of these novels pursues this premise with a vengeance, and each does so by treating some necessity for the representation of violence as a generative principle. I argue that this representational necessity emerges from the text in part through the temporary deferral of assimilation, or what we usually call interpretation and critical thinking. Eventually, after the plenitude of violence has fully run its course, these "generative texts" do call forth various psychological, literary historical, and cultural reflections. They authorize particular explanations by emphasizing the value of pursuing those specific ideas that have explicit recourse to this privileged, generative necessity. Ultimately, Jones depicts an unusual form of wartime identity formation he calls "combat numbness," McCarthy allows violence to substitute for plot and thus challenges notions of narrative and historical understanding, and O'Brien writes a novel which pushes back against its own post-structuralist premises and offers a powerful portrait of living with violence "now" and "then."...