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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+place. These evolved structural adaptations can be seen through the specific experiences and re-experiences of soldiers. Exploring Hemingway’s widely panned novel and Mailer’s widely lauded work focusing on the effects of trauma on the structure of the narrative represents an opportunity to examine how the narrative calculus contributes to understanding the evolution of the narrative structure.
+The illustration of Hemingway’s calculus in ARIT encourages an understanding of his earlier narrative structures — arithmetic, geometry, and algebra. The experience of trauma in the culture-at-large also privileges a sense of awareness of the past mythic narrative structures of war. Hemingway’s narrative structure of calculus captures the experience of war trauma in ARIT embodies yet transcends previous narrative structures. Hemingway offers in the narrative calculus of ARIT a study of change in relation to the experience of trauma as the focus of his fiction, instead of the exploration of the effects of trauma or the spatial experience of trauma. Hemingway writes that Richard Cantwell observes that “[h]e [Gran Maestro] and the Colonel both remembered the men who decided that they did not wish to die; not thinking that he who dies on Thursday does not have to die on Friday” (). In this passage, the external observations of the men are characterized as coalescing with the internal impressions of the narrator. The narrative calculus unfolds as Hemingway appears to examine the alterations of the narrative presence via the figure of Cantwell and his experiences of trauma. The presentation and representation of trauma, as an abject awareness and state, represents a variable that enables a narrative evolution in the structure of ARIT. The narrative’s treatment of trauma, which gives voice to an experience that is abject, alters the presentation of person, space, and time in the narrative structure of the novel.
+Mailer’s novel adopts narrative strata that also illustrates a questioning of the previous representation of objectivity and subjectivity in war narratives. John Limon observes that NAD displays four levels of narrative influence in the work’s content and structure. For Limon, Mailer’s work reflects the in fluence of World War I—in its modernist meanderings, World War II—in its witnessing, interrogation, and visioning of totalitarianism, Cold War—in the book’s ideology, and World War III—in its prediction and inchoate eschatology ().These four elements of influence on Mailer’s text contribute to an understanding of how the “Time Machine” sections operate in the structuring of the narrative. Similar to Hemingway’s treatment involving
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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” (Naked ). 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” (). 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 ==
+Hemingway’s and Mailer’s focus on capturing the traumas of modern war and experience engages and deploys a testimony of questioning and confusion related to the trauma of war. The experience of trauma, in war, often is illustrated in the fictional narratives of war as not simply the threatening of one’s life but the recognition of the threat by the mind as occurring “one moment too late” (Caruth ). The necessity and impossibility of truly grasping the threat to one’s life is repeatedly confronted by both the act of survival and the traumatic experience itself. Thus, in the fictional retellings of traumas in narratives, the attempt is made to capture both the timeliness and timelessness of the experience of trauma. However, conventional narrative structures often do not allow the space or place for the representation of these abject understandings or experiences. The inability of traditional narrative structures to embody and reflect the experience of trauma in a narrative relates to the structuring of these conventional narratives which follow the lines of narrative arithmetic, geometry, and algebra.
+Hemingway and Mailer adopt a different structuring of their narratives involving the trauma of war. Instead of trying to use the traditional elements of narrative to engage the experience in a narrative, these authors use trauma to engage the structuring of the narrative. James Dawes asserts in The Language of War that “war thus initiates a semantic crisis, a crisis of meaning