A Study Of The Collective Memory And The Representation Of Cultural Trauma Of America In The Things They Carried

The Vietnam War was an indelible memory on America.The long-lasting war not only economically,politically,militarily damaged America,but also unconsciously sneaked into the cultural core of the American people.As one of the Vietnam War trauma victims,O’Brien writes down his and his comrades’ Vietnam War experiences and compiled a short story collection The Things They Carried.The short story collection consists of twenty-two short stories.The twenty-two seemingly fragmented stories are actually inter-related.The semi-autobiographical short stories together vividly depicted the devastating effect that the Vietnam War brought upon the American Vietnam War soldiers and the American nation.To understand the narrative technique and the trauma of the short story collection,this thesis will apply the theory of narratology and trauma theory to analyze it.Since the stories are from different facets of focalizations,namely internal focalization,external focalization and zero focalization,the thesis will analyze the narrative craft and prove that the three different focalizations can achieve different narrative purposes.The contradiction between the narrator and the implied author is another outstanding feature of the short story collection which probes the thesis to explore the craft of the narrator’s unreliability and reveal its connotations.During the Vietnam War,the American soldiers were traumatized as a collectivity.And their lives were disturbed by the shared symptoms of PTSD.Besides,the war haunted the American nation in a gloomy atmosphere,thus irrevocably changed the future of the American nation which cannot return to its normal track,the trauma brought by the war has been engraved in the minds of the American people and remains to be the cultural trauma of the whole nation.Therefore,this thesis will apply collective trauma and cultural trauma theories to prove that the Vietnam War is the collective trauma of the American Vietnam War soldiers and the cultural trauma of the American nation.