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 O'Brien the award-winning
Vietnam-veteran storyteller they are fundamentally and irredeemably changed. Tim O'Brien 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. O'Brien 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 O'Brien.Rotating Back to the World is an examination and
re-evaluation of the work of Tim O'Brien and his so-called war stories. By drawing upon a
number of artistic psychological and real-world phenomena James McKenzie investigates the
intersections between O'Brien's subtle and complex narrativizations of the Vietnam War and
current trauma theory. Through a close analysis of O'Brien's four Vietnam war novels McKenzie
examines how O'Brien 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 O'Brien's 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 O'Brien's 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 O'Brien concludes stories can save us. James McKenzie is a former infantry
soldier and now senior lecturer in Anglophone Literature at the University of Hildesheim.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 O'Brien the award-winning
Vietnam-veteran storyteller they are fundamentally and irredeemably changed. Tim O'Brien 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. O'Brien 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 O'Brien.Rotating Back to the World is an examination and
re-evaluation of the work of Tim O'Brien and his so-called war stories. By drawing upon a
number of artistic psychological and real-world phenomena James McKenzie investigates the
intersections between O'Brien's subtle and complex narrativizations of the Vietnam War and
current trauma theory. Through a close analysis of O'Brien's four Vietnam war novels McKenzie
examines how O'Brien 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 O'Brien's 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 O'Brien's own paradoxical relationship with his readers manifested through
a depiction of the seemingly insurmountable challenge of expressing the inexpressible. Finalle
r
