Rotating Back to the World : Trauma Narratives in the Fiction of Tim O'Brien

Why do people go to war? To test themselves, to prove themselves, to hurt themselves, to hurt others. And what happens when they come home? According to Tim OBrien, the award-winning, Vietnam-veteran storyteller, they are fundamentally and irredeemably changed. Tim OBrien makes the argument that war is very much like ordinary life. There are moments of greatness and moments of cowardice. There are moments of success and failure, trust and betrayal, celebration and regret, victory and defeat. OBrien depicts the true cost of war. At the end of the day, there is healing, but so often too, there is irreparable damage. All of this can be found in the novels and stories of Tim OBrien. Rotating Back to the World is an examination and re-evaluation of the work of Tim OBrien and his so-called war stories. By drawing upon a number of artistic, psychological, and real-world phenomena, James McKenzie investigates the intersections between OBriens subtle and complex narrativizations of the Vietnam War and current trauma theory. Through a close analysis of OBriens four Vietnam war novels, McKenzie examines how OBrien successfully navigates the writerly pitfalls of representing trauma without betraying the manifold and incommensurable nature of individual traumatic experience. In particular, McKenzie pays attention to OBriens ludic art of storytelling and his increasing use of narratological experimentation and metafictional commentary. McKenzie examines these literary practices in order to consider how they are deployed as an artistic means of representing the full range of combat experience and its traumatic aftermath. This study also explores OBriens own paradoxical relationship with his readers, manifested through a depiction of the seemingly insurmountable challenge of expressing the inexpressible. Finally, McKenzie returns to the main idea that in the desire to both relate and understand traumatic experience, as OBrien concludes, stories can save us.