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

Modern and contemporary American narrative structures that attempt to embody traumatic experiences of war treat an experience not occurring within normal subjective or objective expressions of narrative understandings. Therefore, narratives deploy a structure and a point of view that differs from earlier structures involving more defined and stable positions of subjectivity and objectivity. In the narrative presentation of war in literary structures, the awareness experienced in relation to trauma is abject; it is knowledge that operates from without and within and sometimes from another space of understanding. The novels and narratives that arise out of the experience of World War II, in particular, engage a structure that uses a point of view that attempts to speak from and not to the abject experience and understanding of trauma and war.