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

American war narratives following World War I and World War II reference a relatively inchoate tradition of American war writing initiated by the fiction following the first truly American war, the Civil War. The narratives that draw on the Civil War engage a narrative structure of questioning and concern with subjectivity and objectivity. Stephen Crane’s ''The Red Badge of Courage'' (1895) and Ambrose Bierce’s ''Chickamauga'' (1891) represent this new attempt at constructing a war narrative. In these war stories, the structure of the narrative appears to oscillate between traditional presentations of narrative subjectivity and objectivity as these authors attempt to speak of the dark knowledge of war and trauma. Robert Penn Warren in ''The Legacy of the Civil War'' argues that the fictions following the Civil War engage the idea that to have history, one has to have stories, and the nature of these stories is to be fallen, to face the dark side of one’s own nature, and to have some dark knowledge one cannot bear having. Warren’s notions preface a tension that ultimately surfaces in the narratives of modern and contemporary American war