An Analysis Of Nuclear Anxiety In The Nuclear Age From A Perspective Of Spatial Narrative

The invention of nuclear weapons has been taken as a milestone in the history of science and technology except for the fact that it has brought the human race a brand-new war pattern, i.e., nuclear warfare. The US military's having dropped nuclear weapons respectively on Hiroshima and Nagasaki near the end of WWII was the first use of nuclear weapons in war history, which not only carved its massive damage and ruinous misery in the memory of the world people of the time, but also has thrown the later generations into the horrible aftermath of its devastating power. After the Cold War broke out, an arms race between the US and the former USSR, featuring nuclear weapons, began, the result of which was the ever-increasing stockpile of nuclear weapons. Numerous crises increased the tension between the two hostile blocs, and a nuclear haze hovered over the world for several decades. Psychologists had studied the psychology of civilians under nuclear deterrence and the findings from their research were significant. At the same time, nuclear anxiety as a topic was absent in literature of the period until the year of 1985, when The Nuclear Age by Tim O'Brien showed up as a masterpiece of this kind.O'Brien challenges the linear-narrating tradition by means of juxtaposition, cutting back and forth, collage and other post-modernist writing techniques to halt the time flow of narration, which generates a spatial effect of spaciousness and stiflingness. In accordance with this approach, this thesis analyzes The Nuclear Age from the perspective of spatial narrative, initiated by Joseph Frank, to elaborate how narrative space externalizes the protagonist's nuclear anxiety caused by nuclear deterrence from the perspective of text space, story space and reader's perceptional space respectively. Text space is illuminated by the novel's structure, which is similar to the structure of a sandwich, and the arrangement of the plot, which is in a state of juxtaposition, where the protagonist's narration shuttles back and forth between the present and retrospection, reflecting the mind of the protagonist as it swings between sanity and insanity, and his behavior out of the ordinary. Story space consists of the physical space and the abstract space. Story space reveals both the desire of the protagonist to flee from reality, to strive for a peaceful and safe space as well as the impact the protagonist's nuclear anxiety has on all of his relationships. The reader's perceptional space conveys O'Brien's affection towards the earth and home; it molds the traumatized protagonist to develop the psychological common ground between the reader and the author.Hence this thesis draws its conclusion that narrative space is one of the most effective approaches to externalize the mental activities; the analysis of the nuclear anxiety in Cold War period from the perspective of spatial narrative, by taking The Nuclear Age as a case in point, is significant in helping not only the present-day reader to feel the impact of the nuclear arms race between the US and the former USSR on the earth but also scholars to further study the Cold War culture.