Carried in Common: Blame, Responsibility, and the Body in Tim O'Brien's Vietnam War Novels
Date
2018-03-05
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Abstract
Guilt and blame are two significant thematic concerns for Tim O’Brien in his Vietnam war novels Going After Cacciato and The Things They Carried. However, both novels depict characters who interact with a vibrant world of ambient things which have a remarkable ability to effect change and influence the actions of the humans who nominally control them. Under the theoretical rubric of Object-Oriented Ontology (including the scholarship of Graham Harman, Bill Brown, Jane Bennett, and Karen Barad), this project challenges the uniqueness of human agency in the world while also considering the dubiousness of assigning singular blame and responsibility to human agents acting within a network of causal actors. While the majority of readings of O’Brien take a post-colonial position or investigate the author’s construction of truth through metafictional literary practices, this approach takes a broader view of O’Brien’s literary world, and the place of the human agent within it.
Description
Keywords
Tim O'Brien, Vietnam War Literature, Object-Oriented Ontology, New Materialism, Ethics, Moral Responsibility, Thing Theory
Citation
Brewer, Z. A. (2018). Carried in Common: Blame, Responsibility, and the Body in Tim O'Brien's Vietnam War Novels (Master's thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/20269