The Beleaguered Individual - This doctoral dissertation by Patrick Paul Christle examines 20th century American war novels and argues that war is a sort of intensified experience of and an allegory for the world at large for the authors studied. Thus, they use the battlefield as the stage upon which to work out their explorations of what it means to be a modern individual.
Conversation Across a Century: The War Stories of Ambrose Bierce and Tim O’Brien - Christopher Campbell argues that, in the literature of Bierce and O'Brien, similarities of theme and treatment attest to the universality of the soldier’s experience. Likewise, differences of tone and meaning in the tales of each writer tell us more about contrasts between the philosophies of the authors than the dissimilarities of their wars or times.
Experiences of "Soldiers of Fortune" - A study of Korean novels about the Vietnam War by Jinim Park.
“Incense and Ashes”: The Postmodern Work of Refutation in Three Vietnam War Novels - Steven P. Liparulo discusses Tim O’Brien’s "The Things They Carried" and two novels by North Vietnamese veterans--Bao Ninh’s "The Sorrow of War" and "Novel Without a Name" by Duong Thu Huong. Liparulo argues that these texts can be said to engage in Socratic refutations of powerful master narratives and to represent anxiety and ambivalence towards love, patriotism, religion, the obligations of citizenship. [PDF]
Joseph Heller’s Combat Experiences in "Catch-22" - Michael C. Scoggins argues that Heller’s military career played a much greater role in the concept and structure of "Catch-22" than most critics have ever suspected. Many of the characters and incidents in the novel were in fact drawn directly from Heller’s tour of duty and were simply modified or exaggerated for dramatic effect. [PDF]
The Mind at War - This essay by Kalí Tal is concerned with the re-vision of images of women in novels written by American combat veterans of the Vietnam War, and a new examination of the connection that those images have with the author's process of healing from the trauma of combat.
The Self-Reflexive War: War Looking at Film Looking at War - This essay by Kalí Tal discusses the images of film in two novels by Vietnam veterans -- Robert Anderson's "Service for the Dead" and Stephen Wright's "Meditations in Green" -- because these works use film and the filmmaker as a central metaphor.
"The Things They Carried" as Composite Novel - Farrell O'Gorman argues that Tim O’Brien's "The Things They Carried" is best characterized as neither novel nor collection of short stories, but as what Maggie Dunn and Ann Morris have defined as a composite novel, one in which the interrelationship of the parts creates the coherent whole text.
Two Spanish Civil War Novels and Questions of Canonicity - D.A. Boxwell discusses Rose Macaulay's "And No Man's Wit" and Ernest Hemingway's "For Whom the Bell Tolls." Boxwell argues that Macaulay's novel is one of countless object lessons in how literary canonization suffers from strategic amnesia.