| This dissertation examines the literature of disillusionment, specifically as it applies to the genre of public war correspondence. The work begins with the premise from which the examined authors themselves began: that a disillusioned nation during war is a healthy one; indeed, to achieve its disillusionment is the primary objective of the war correspondents considered. Resistance on the part of certain groups within the government, army, and public to his kind of truth-telling made them opponents whose defeat was necessary if the correspondents were to succeed in putting the nation into a state of healthy disillusionment. The first part of this dissertation examines how the Duke of Wellington and William Howard Russell established the paradigms of the disillusioned official and public war correspondents respectively. Their correspondence of their on-going wars was shaped into first-echelon narratives that, by establishing the strategically important first impression, defeated the dangerous illusions of the nation's government, public, and army leaders that prevented them from comprehending the particular war they were waging. Russell's success during the Crimean War, though, came at the expense of Wellington's successor, whose reputation he ruined, and the Aberdeen government, whose fall his first-echelon narratives precipitated. After the Crimean War, British officials, in order to protect themselves from experiencing similar fates, assimilated the public correspondent into an official capacity. That development, along with the policy of censorship, became the basis for a new use of first-echelon narratives: to create an illusory first impression in the minds of readers that would resist the subsequent bad news all wars generate.;The second part of the dissertation examines the memoir as the literary response toward that disturbing development, a response which I call a second-echelon narrative. Writers like Graham Greene, Bernard Fall, David Halberstam, and Michael Herr used their narratives to establish a new impression of an old event, for the purpose of destroying the illusory first impression. Their memoirs (factual and fictional) were shaped as counter-narratives whose objective was to subsume and defeat not only the false first impression of an on-going war, but its narrators as well. For America's Vietnam War, the objective of these disillusioned correspondents was also urgent: to break through a narrative spell established by an illusory first impression in time to change the way a nation prosecuted its war. |
