| dc.description.abstract | This thesis analyzes the process by which three American novels
about the Vietnam War—David Halberstam*s One Very Hot Day^ Gustav
Hasford*s The Short-Timers, and Stephen Wright's Meditations in
Green—attempt simultaneously to reveal the chaos of the war and to
defuse its horror by containing it within artistic structures. Since
chaos is by definition formless, the result of this process,
paradoxically, is to underscore the intractable nature of Vietnam as a
subject for fiction. Each author creates a double-layered structure for
his novel which testifies to the chaos of Vietnam even as it imparts
order to it. The larger structure provides a strict literary frame,
which allows a limited but orderly expression of the Vietnam experience.
Authorial control over subject and form is maintained on this level of
structure through the development of revelatory fictions, closed texts,
and the prudent application of specific narrative techniques adapted from
cinema. In the sub-structure, contained within the larger frame, the
protagonist mirrors the author's activity by imposing imaginative
structures on the war in order to protect his psyche from its destructive
might. To this end, the protagonist works to control his perception of
the war through self-embedded retreats into memory, fantasy, or fiction.
However, these escapist internal fictions and interior monologues are
futile in that they cannot withstand the war's destabilizing effect.
Thus, whereas the larger structure constitutes the imposition of form on
chaos, the sub-structure depicts the overwhelining of form by the chaotic destruction of the war. The sub-structure is thus an iinplicit caranent on
the inadequacy of artistic forms as a defense against the war. Yet,
paradoxically, such artistic shaping is necessary to any fictional
representation of the war. Therefore, this thesis argues that the
tension between form and chaos—as represented by the two levels of
structure—is vital to the success of these novels as honest, literary
portrayals of the Vietnam War.
This thesis also contains a canprehensive glossary of terms and
phrases which were used by American servicemen in Vietnam, and which
frequently appear in the many novels of the war. For the layman
unfamiliar with the jargon of the war or of the military, this glossary
is, in itself, an introduction to the contrary inpulses of order and
chaos which worked on the Americans in Vietnam in that it demonstrates
the extreme linguistic efforts made during that era to standardize,
stabilize, and contain the essentially intractable experience of the war. | |
