A Study Of Afghan Narratives In Contemporary American War Writing

The United States announced on Aug.30,2021,that U.S.forces had completed their withdrawal from Afghanistan,marking the end of nearly 20 years of U.S.military operations in the country.As the longest war in U.S.history,the U.S.writing on Afghanistan and the Afghan War has become a mirror that maps the history and future of the United States.This paper will explore how contemporary America constructs a narrative discourse on Afghanistan by looking at the language of images,film,and journalism in the American media,Afghanborn author Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns,and American journalist Jake Tapper’s The Outpost.The paper will be divided into five parts as follows.The introductory section introduces the American war fiction tradition,Afghan narratives and contemporary American war literature writing,composes the current state of research on media war writing,Khaled Hosseini’s novels and postcolonialism,and clarifies the research content and significance of this paper.Chapter 1 is divided into three parts.The first part takes Steve Mc Curry’s documentary photography “Afghan Girl”,which appeared on the cover of National Geographic magazine in1985,as an example,and explores how the public assimilates and accepts the meaningful content of the image symbols silently in the rational recognition and legitimate imagination of values,and how the visual imagery is related to the specific hegemonic In this study,we explore how the public quietly assimilates and accepts the meaningful content of the image symbols in the rational identification and legitimate imagination of values,and establishes cognitive equivalence and identity connection between visual images and specific hegemonic discourse,lifestyle,values,historical memory,philosophy of life or identity imagination.Second,taking the film “Girl’s War Skating Lesson” as an example,we analyze how Carol Dysinger infiltrates Western values into the footage from the narrative technique and content of the documentary,thus showing the cultural export of Westernism.Finally,the representations of the war in Afghanistan by mainstream American media and official institutions between 2001 and 2023 are compiled.The Washington Post,USA Today,The New York Times,and the Christian Science Monitor are used to analyze three aspects of American The third chapter focuses on Khaled K.K.,the author of the book on the war in Afghanistan.The second chapter focuses on the traces of America placed by Khaled Hosseini in A Thousand Splendid Suns and how he accomplishes the self-identification of American values.Hosseini places the restoration of order in the life of the protagonist Laila in the context of the U.S.declaration of war against the Taliban after September 11,which implicitly reveals the writer’s identification with the American “messianic” image and American interventionist privilege.In addition,“A Thousand Splendid Suns” was originally titled “Dreams In Titanic City”,and Kabul,the capital of Afghanistan,is the “Titanic City” in the author’s mind.Although the novel was later renamed before publication,it still implies the American stamp Hosseini put on it.Finally,Hosseini mirrors the internal problems of American society by depicting an Afghanistan in which the country is in turmoil,the population is precarious,the ethnic groups are hierarchical,and women are oppressed under a male domination of the Taliban’s religiously extreme politicized dictatorship.Hosseini places the image of Afghanistan within the larger narrative of the West,thus allowing Afghanistan to be incorporated into the American value system as a complement to culture and image.In the construction of the image of Afghanistan,the current state of America is either mirrored or utopianized.Chapter 3 focuses on the failure of the export of American values as reflected in the nonfiction literature “The Outpost” the American reflection on the war in Afghanistan,and the image of the “good doctor” of the United States that it implies.Through the imagery that the writer places in the text that deviates from its meaning-the brave and broken American heroes,the ongoing but forgotten war-the writer and the Americans he represents analyze the breakdown and entanglement of trust in the American “myth”.Although “ The Outpost ”examines the state of existence,fate,and relationships of people in the Afghan war,repeatedly interrogates the meaning of war,constantly questions the U.S.government,and engages in a conscious rebellion against the official mainstream discourse,it also reveals the writer’s inadvertent attitude and position-perhaps the war itself is wrong,but still convinced of American values and spiritual core.values,the spiritual core,is still deeply believed.So Jake Tapper has spared no effort in describing the American plan for “national reconstruction” in Afghanistan,trying to present the image of the United States as a trustworthy “good doctor”.The book is originally titled The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor,which can be translated as “The Outpost: The Untold Story of American Valor”.The word “valor” reveals Tapper’s position that the U.S.war in Afghanistan is a just war,and that this thinking is still in fact under the U.S.power discourse.system.Out of these two aspects,the text ultimately presents a paradox and a tear between conscious rebellion and unconscious compliance.The concluding section further explores the American culture of war and the American national identity,as well as the expected responses of local Afghan writers to the narratives of September 11 and the Afghan war,based on the study of the Afghan narratives in American war writing.