On Intertextuality In In The Lake Of The Woods By Tim O’Brien

Vietnam War literature appears as a new type of American literature in the second half of the twentieth century. American Vietnam War writers not only depict the war itself, the reality of American society before and during the war, but also describe the deep influence on American society brought about by the war. Tim O’Brien is acclaimed to be the best writer of the Vietnam War, having finished eight excellent Vietnam War books, and he mainly uses postmodernist techniques to depict the War and war experiences. Recent critical articles about him at home and aboard mainly focus on his masterpieces Going After Cacciato, The Things They Carried and In the Lake of the Woods. The novels’artistic features, especially postmodernist writing style are the scholars’research center. In the Lake of the Woods was published in1994, and the critical articles in small quantity still focus on his artistic features and ignore the multi-text structure.This thesis tries to interpret In the Lake of the Woods from the perspective of intertextuality and promulgate its profound thematic significance. The theoretical foundation of intertextuality is that "any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations and any text is the absorption and transformation of another text." In In the Lake of the Woods, intertextual texts appear everywhere. O’Brien quotes historical truth, other novels, court-martial testimony, interviews and news reports to explore the cruelty of the My Lai Massacre and trauma of American society brought by the Vietnam War. Based upon the theory of intertextuality, this thesis unearths the novel’s profound themes through the study of intertextual relationship respectively between novel and historical truth, novel and mass media, and novel and martial court.This thesis consists of five chapters. The first chapter briefly introduces Tim O’Brien and his novel In the Lake of the Woods. It also illustrates the significance of the research and the relevant theories and briefly states the layout of the thesis. Chapter Two is divided into two sections. Section one represents happening-truth of the Vietnam War through time order; section two deals with story-truth through novel order, so as to compare their differences. Chapter Three also consists of two sections. The first section is concerned with the interviews of real soldiers and fictitious soldiers;the second section illustrates real reports and fictitious ones for comparing the differences between media-truth and novel-truth. Court-martial testimonies and U.S. Amy investigations in Chapter Four add weight to the fact that what happened in history is unchangeable. The last chapter is the conclusion of the whole thesis and re-explores the novel’s theme:by citing lots of other genres and testimonies, O’Brien powerfully proves that the My Lai Massacre in the Vietnam War is indisputable truth, thus clarifying the cruelty of the Vietnam War and the unchangeability of happening-truth. It also puts forward the possibilities of further research on this novel.