'Garden of evil' : images of the enemy in American war literature 1962-1990

Boulting, DJ

Abstract

The following thesis interrogates representations of the enemy in three
American war novels: James Jones's The Thin Red Line (1962), Larry
Heinemann's Paco's Story (1986), and Tim O'Brien's The Things They
Carried (1990). While American literary responses to the Vietnam War are
the primary concern of this thesis, The Thin Red Line, a 'late' World War II
novel, is interrogated as a generic benchmark against which the two Vietnam
novels can be compared and contrasted, both in terms of the paradigms of
Japanese and Vietnamese enemy images, and with reference to the
depiction of internal enemies. The close textual analyses provided in this
thesis are broadly historicist and shaped by cultural studies, and the primary
texts are discussed with extensive reference to their social, cultural and
historical contexts.
Four key thematic concerns inform this study of literary enemies and
these frequently interpenetrate: first, American myths of national identity the
'self from and in binary opposition to which all American enemies spring;
second, the exploitation of gender and sexuality as tropes through which
Americans and American enemies are shaped; third, race and racist
discourses (including the imagery of miscegenation, racial 'purity' and
'corruption'); and fourth, internecine and intra-subjective enemies and forms
of conflict.
The 'conventional' enemy in the novels discussed is Japanese or
Vietnamese, but conceptions of 'the enemy within' also form a central
concern of this thesis, one that reaches its ultimate expression in the novels'
engagement with intra-subjective conflict: war at the level of the self. This
thesis therefore provides a study of conventional enemies alongside a
discussion of an array of enemies and threats to the soldier subject that are
not exclusively traceable to the actions of the conventional enemy and that
do not always recede with the formal cessation of hostilities. Additionally, it
identifies and interrogates sites of conflict and expressions of enmity in the
relations of writer, narrator and reader.

Citation

Boulting, D. 'Garden of evil' : images of the enemy in American war literature 1962-1990. (Thesis). University of Salford

• Thesis Type: Thesis
• Deposit Date: Aug 16, 2021
• Award Date: Jan 1, 2008