Six eyes gazing at the ghosts in the dark: Three novelists' explorations into the memories of the Vietnam War

This thesis examines literary representations of the Vietnam War from the perspectives of writers from three countries of the United States, Vietnam, and Japan. In doing so, I used the following fictional works; Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, Bao Ninh's The Sorrow of War, and Takeshi Kaiko's Into a Black Sun. These three authors actually participated in the Vietnam War and witnessed the country at war with their own eyes. Through the medium of literature, they tried to reenact the cruelty of war.;Investigating the Vietnam War novels of O'Brien, Ninh, and Kaiko, I found that these three writers particularly direct their attention toward the absolute gap between the institutional political forces and the individuals in the arena of the Vietnam War. The essence of this chasm can be aptly understood by the American sociologist Avery Gordon's theoretical concept of "ghostly matter." The stories of the war victims in the novels of O'Brien, Ninh, and Kaiko convey the truth of war which exists behind the official data on the war. Examining the "ghost stories" in the three writers' novels, I try to answer the following questions: (1) What truths do O'Brien, Ninh, and Kaiko tell us about the Vietnam War? (2) How do the three novelists attempt to reenact what they saw in Vietnam through their cultural medium of literature? and (3) How did the war change the three authors' protagonists and the authors themselves?...