The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Effects of Trauma on the Narrative Structures of Across the River and Into the Trees and The Naked and the Dead: Difference between revisions
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narrative calculus in his ARIT Mailer, too, plays with a variety of narrative positions in his novel in relation to trauma in war. The shifts in person, place, and even in thought contribute to providing a narrative voice to a previously silenced voicing of the experience of trauma during war. Mailer’s novel opens with, “Nobody could sleep” and continues in the second paragraph with “[a] solider lies flat on his bunk, closes his eyes, and remains wide awake” {{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=3}}. In this passage, the narrative voice assumes a point-of-view situation that operates without a traditional deployment of narrative subjectivity or objectivity. This altered point of view is illustrated in the focus presented through the experience of “nobody,” and then it is further engaged by the assumption of a narrative position relegated to war trauma—“a soldier” {{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=3}}. The opening passages of the novel illustrate a shifting point of view in the structure of the novel that moves beyond traditional subjective and objective narrative presentations of war trauma. | narrative calculus in his ''ARIT'' Mailer, too, plays with a variety of narrative positions in his novel in relation to trauma in war. The shifts in person, place, and even in thought contribute to providing a narrative voice to a previously silenced voicing of the experience of trauma during war. Mailer’s novel opens with, “Nobody could sleep” and continues in the second paragraph with “[a] solider lies flat on his bunk, closes his eyes, and remains wide awake” {{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=3}}. In this passage, the narrative voice assumes a point-of-view situation that operates without a traditional deployment of narrative subjectivity or objectivity. This altered point of view is illustrated in the focus presented through the experience of “nobody,” and then it is further engaged by the assumption of a narrative position relegated to war trauma—“a soldier” {{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=3}}. The opening passages of the novel illustrate a shifting point of view in the structure of the novel that moves beyond traditional subjective and objective narrative presentations of war trauma. | ||
== TRAUMATIC POINTS OF VIEW: NARRATIVE STRUCTURES AND WAR IN HEMINGWAY AND MAILER == | == TRAUMATIC POINTS OF VIEW: NARRATIVE STRUCTURES AND WAR IN HEMINGWAY AND MAILER == | ||
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The notion underlying a narrative evolution to a more calculean movement occurring as a result of war trauma focuses on the effects of war trauma on narrative point of view—specifically on the objectivity and subjectivity—operating in their World War II narratives. Lyndsey Stonebridge suggests that the trauma of war affects the understanding of narrative point of view profoundly in the structuring of war fiction. Stonebridge asserts that | The notion underlying a narrative evolution to a more calculean movement occurring as a result of war trauma focuses on the effects of war trauma on narrative point of view—specifically on the objectivity and subjectivity—operating in their World War II narratives. Lyndsey Stonebridge suggests that the trauma of war affects the understanding of narrative point of view profoundly in the structuring of war fiction. Stonebridge asserts that | ||
<blockquote> the only thing accidental about the experience of fighting in the trenches in the first war was that one managed to survive at all; nonetheless it was shell-shock that confirmed that the trauma of war, similarly, could obliterate the time of the mind . . . What could be described as a traumatic temporality set the terms for much literary and cultural modernism for the first part of the | <blockquote> the only thing accidental about the experience of fighting in the trenches in the first war was that one managed to survive at all; nonetheless it was shell-shock that confirmed that the trauma of war, similarly, could obliterate the time of the mind . . . What could be described as a traumatic temporality set the terms for much literary and cultural modernism for the first part of the 20th century—as well as what was to follow. Freud’s originality was to insist that trauma not only had an effect on the mind, but that it constituted what we think of as human subjectivity itself. {{sfn|Stonebridge|2009|p=196}}</blockquote> | ||
In this movement, the traumas of war do not simply ravage the participants physically, but the individuals who experience war trauma are traumatized more deeply by the idea, echoing Stonebridge that “the trauma of the war” undoes their “deepest fantasies of themselves as peacetime masculine subjects” {{sfn|Stonebridge|2009|p=197}}. Stonebridge’s argument focuses on the notion—introduced and engaged in the burgeoning psychoanalytic community surrounding the world wars— that the traumas of war do not only affect the bodies of the | In this movement, the traumas of war do not simply ravage the participants physically, but the individuals who experience war trauma are traumatized more deeply by the idea, echoing Stonebridge that “the trauma of the war” undoes their “deepest fantasies of themselves as peacetime masculine subjects” {{sfn|Stonebridge|2009|p=197}}. Stonebridge’s argument focuses on the notion—introduced and engaged in the burgeoning psychoanalytic community surrounding the world wars— that the traumas of war do not only affect the bodies of the | ||