Realistic Presentation Of War Experience

A series of wars fought on the international scene during the first part of the twentieth century as well as the subsequent Vietnam War affected the life of Americans and their literary writings. Accordingly the war story as an important part of the realistic novel becomes a vital force in American literature. War stories invariably emphasize the shock of a new kind of experience, the social and personal dislocation as well as the shock of blood and carnage. Tim O'Brien, contemporary postmodernist American novelist, makes his decision to present"the nightmare he faced in a Vietnam rice paddy"as fiction and creates a number of novels about the Vietnam War. But his topics place an emphasis on the contemporary dilemmas faced by those who may be unwilling participants in an unpopular war. C. W. Lewis believes that some of O'Brien's stories"dissolve into clever artifice"and, therefore, are not as effective as actual memoirs of the Vietnam experience would be.The novel as an assumption of modern cultural landscapes can reflect the human experience in all its dimensions and in a realistic way. Based on this fact, this thesis tries to demonstrate that O'Brien's"artifice"communicates his emotions and experiences more effectively than a straightforward memoir could.The thesis singles out O'Brien's short story"How to Tell a True War Story"and concentrates on the comparative analysis of it with Hemingway's short story"Soldier's Home"in terms of the narrative point of view. As a master of the war story, and greatly and permanently affected by the war experiences, Hemingway formed his own writing style, together with his theme and hero. In his"Soldier's Home", he employs the limited third-person narrator to reflect the state of mind of a young man Krebs who is out of step, incapable of talking about what he has gone through and falling back on routines, and deadened by his war experience. Whereas O'Brien uses the limited first-person narrator in his metafictional story"How to Tell a True War Story"to reflect on the actual events he's writing about and on the parts he plays as the writer of his story and as a character in his story. O'Brien plays the story from three angles at once and acknowledges himself from each point. The story tells some absurd war stories and portrays with a touch of postmodernist"Black Humor"the soldiers'twisted psychological metamorphosis, thus demonstrating their disgust at warfare and their fear for death. The different choices of point of view enable each of the two stories to intensely focus on only one character's view of the war and on inner experience of war in the emotional journey of a central character. The two different limited narrative perspectives are in a position to reveal the inner information of the characters by telling in an ironic way what a war soldier can not tell about the war experiences and the aftermath of the war.This thesis has five chapters. The first chapter is an introduction to the whole paper. The second chapter introduces the two writers'main works and their experience of serving in the military. The third chapter explains how the two writers tell their true war stories by separate point-of-view strategies. The fourth chapter analyses the shared effects created by the two limited perspectives, which are employed by the two writers. The last chapter makes a conclusion about the contents and ideas of the whole paper. The two short stories are not about the war of swords or arms, but about the tremendous changes in the post-war soldiers'heart. By using different point-of-view strategies the two stories gain a realistic insight of the characters and make the authors'purpose accomplished: these two writers, though from different time periods, both show us how to tell a true war story; they both give a deeper meaning to the war and the war's aftermath. By using the limited first-person narrator in his postmodernist metafiction, however, O'Brien seems to better justify the modernistic vision that truth does exist objectively but is the product of a personal interaction with reality.