Vietnam War Literature

Paper Summary:

This paper explains that Vietnam War literature positions American religion as being a God-fearing culture that seeks to be moral. The author points out works by Tim O'Brien, Norman Mailer and Robert Bly that refer to this everyday American religion and culture and to myths of American power, politicians and industrialists as being insane and immoral and as changing forever how Americans saw their country. The paper relates that these works project the Vietnam conflict as something in which Americans should never have been involved including describing its soldiers as victims or as people responsible for terrible crimes of war. The author stresses that Vietnam was a working-class war rejected by the American bourgeoisie, who did not need to go to combat. The paper concludes that the literature discussed in the paper is the work of Americans with the option not to go to Vietnam and that it needs to be examined along with other literature produced in the next decades, too.

Table of Contents:
Introduction
Damning Literature
Tim O'Brien's "In the Field"
Norman Mailer
Robert Bly Poem: "The Teeth Mother Naked at Last"
Last Remarks

From the Paper:

"Norman Mailer's "The Army of the Night" was published in 1968 and is an allegorical description of the March on the Pentagon. The reader is shown the extreme contrast between rather decadent hippies of the anti-Vietnam War movement and the thousands who then fought in Vietnam, ordinary Americans who dealt with every terrible aspect of jungle warfare. The last pages of "A Confrontation by the River" tell of a clash of American popular myths and moral beliefs about America and a "true religious war of Christ against the Communist" in relation to Vietnam towards a "whole crisis of Christianity in America... ""

Sample of Sources Used:

• Bly, Robert. "The Teeth Mother Naked at Last." The Heath Anthology of American Literature - Volume E: Contemporary Period, 1945 to the Present. Ed. Paul Lauter et al. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006.
• Hellman, John. American Myth and the Legacy of Vietnam. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986.
• Herr, Michael. "Dispatches." The Heath Anthology of American Literature - Volume E, 2006.
• Mailer, Norman. "The Armies of the Night." The Heath Anthology of American Literature - Volume E, 2006.
• O'Brien, Tim. "In the Field." The Heath Anthology of American Literature - Volume E, 2006.

More papers on Vietnam War Literature:

• Analytical Essay # 65026 : "Vietnam War Literature"
• Book Review # 46102 : "The U.S. Economy and the Vietnam War"
• Comparison Essay # 42331 : "The Vietnam War"

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