A New Historical Interpretation Of Why Are We In Vietnam?

Norman Mailer is one of the greatest American writers of the 20 th century.Why Are We in Vietnam? is one of the most famous novels narrating the Vietnam War.Compare this novel to the other novels of the same period about Vietnam War,it is special because it maps the Vietnam War as a hunting war through metaphor to reveal the violence and cruelty of the war.This thesis analyzes the novel from the perspective of New Historicism and tries to deeply understand the relationship between text and history.This thesis consists of five chapters.The three chapters of the main part analyze Why Are We in Vietnam? by using the New Historical concepts: historicity of texts,textuality of history and power.The first chapter of the main part analyzes this novel from the historical background of the novel,the racial discrimination,and the totalitarianism of the American government to show the historicity.The second chapter exposes the hypocrisy of the American government in foreign affairs and satirizes the behavior of participating in the war through metaphor and satire in the novel;furthermore,it interprets how the social energy effects on text and society through circulation in order to indicate the meaning of the text to construct history.The third chapter exposes the effect of power on text and society as an ideology from subversion,containment and consolidation of Greenblatt to interpret the power of ideology in the text.While narrating the past history,Mailer also provides a window for modern people to understand the true relationship between history and literature.The purpose of this thesis is to analyze historicity of text,textuality of history and power that affect in text,and arouse people to pay attention to the inspiration of history to society.This could help to stimulate people to observe history and reality from a political perspective and to cultivate the public's critical spirit in irrational systems.