| Post-war literature is a genre distinct from war literature. Although its works contain descriptions of the traumatic combat experiences so fundamental to war literature, it focuses rather on the psychological injuries suffered by the survivors of such experiences and their post-war, post-traumatic recovery process. Any analysis of post-war literature, therefore, requires a thorough understanding of the psychological effects of trauma and the dynamics of post-war recovery.;The foundation of post-war literature and its principal dialectic is the veteran's struggle to bear witness to the traumatic events he experienced during war and thereby to integrate the war into his consciousness and the warrior into his identity and to give meaning and purpose to his survival. According to psychiatrist Jonathan Shay, "healing from trauma depends upon communalization of the trauma---being able safely to tell the story to someone who is listening and who can be trusted to retell it truthfully to others in the community." In essence, the telling of the story becomes a ritual or ceremony of healing much like the cleansing ceremonies of ancient, warrior cultures. The telling of the story forces the veteran to organize the fragments of memory into a cohesive and coherent narrative, to begin evaluating and interpreting his war experiences, and to begin grieving and mourning the losses, of others and his self, that resulted from those experiences.;The veteran's community, however, may resist the veteran's efforts to communalize his war trauma, because war stories challenge people's faith in their political, economic, and social status quo. According to Judith Herman, the typical reactions to trauma---"denial, repression, and dissociation[---]operate on a social as well as individual level." However, because war is a communal rather than an individual endeavor, the community needs to hear and accept the veteran's story in order to achieve its own meaningful post-war recovery. The works examined in this dissertation---by writers such as Virginia Woolf, Pat Barker, Tim O'Brien, Larry Heinemann, John Mulligan, and Leslie Marmon Silko---explore the tug of war between the veteran's need to communalize his trauma and his community's efforts to avoid such communalization. |
