The Iraq War Narrative By The U.S.Veteran

Ever since the beginning of the Iraq war,the United States has come to a new period of wartime,and the war has been exerting continuing effects on the American culture,as various kinds of media have been trying to represent the war from different perspectives.Redeployment,as a short story collection by the Iraq war veteran Phil Klay,is one successful literary representation of the war.The book has won the 2014 American National Book Award for fiction and has received much praise from both the press and the literary academia.However,of all the previous research home and abroad,few have treated the short story collection as a narrative entirety and explored the interactions between the author,the text,and the reader in the context of the contemporary American war culture.The present thesis drawing from James Phelan's Rhetorical Narrative Theory,takes the character narration in the collection as a starting point and explores the dynamic communications between the author of the narrative and the reader,with consideration of contemporary American war culture as a context and the author's intention in the literary writing.The study indicates that the three aspects of character narrations—the veterans' battlefield experience,their predicaments after coming back home,as well as the reconstruction in Iraq—are actually an Iraq war narrative constructed by the author,based on his personal involvement in the war.The three aspects can be considered as the three connotations of “Redeployment”,and has thus become the basis of the framework of the thesis' s Main Body.The whole thesis consists of three parts: the Introduction,the Main Body and the Conclusion.The brief introduction provides the research background,previous research,theoretical bases as well as the framework of the thesis.The Main Body is divided into three chapters.Chapter one concerns with the character narrations of the battlefield experience.Through the analysis of the narrative structure,the language and tones of the narrators,thischapter finds out the presentation of the war in terms of the precision strike,the multiple combat modes and the presentation of violence.By relating it with the author's intention,this chapter reflects on the cruelty of the war and the complexity of the soldiers' conditions in the redeployment to the battlefield.Chapter two quests the telling of the veteran's predicaments back in the U.S.This chapter checks through character narrators the PTSD of individual veterans,the complex ties among veteran's community,and the civilian-military gap in the whole society.From these analyses,the chapter unveils the author's intention in trying to bridge the civilian-military gap and start conversations between the veterans and the society during the redeployment back to the U.S.Chapter three examines the character narration of the post-war reconstruction of Iraq.This chapter takes the depiction of the Iraq and the U.S.roles in the reconstruction as a prism to analyze the author's attitude towards the post-war reconstruction.From the analysis,this chapter reveals the author's efforts in shifting the responsibility of the failure of reconstruction and the waging of the war to Iraq through the redeployment to the post-war Iraq.The concluding part further summarizes the contents of the Main Body,and reveals how Redeployment has managed to present the Iraq war Narrative and the war's influence as comprehensive as possible through the veteran's narration under the context of contemporary American war culture,and extends the reflection on the significance of literature in the contemporary world.