Killer Trees and Homicidal Grass: The Anthropomorphic Landscape in the American Prose Narrative of the Vietnam War

Reading the landscape of Vietnam (the climate, the jungle, the topography) as an anthropomorphic character in the American prose narrative of the war provides a unique insight into the inner landscapes of the men who fought there and now write about it. William V. Spanos writes that the urge to name--to anthropomorphize--is man\u27s method for dealing with the existential nothingness of being. Zohreh T. Sullivan, in discussing the landscape of Joseph Conrad, perceives landscape as a projection of the author\u27s own psychic turmoil. Furthermore, Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space recognizes the imaginative value that man places on space, and his work describes the psychological implications placed upon different spaces. Utilizing all of the above critical approaches, I examine five American prose narratives of the Vietnam War: two works of nonfiction--Philip Caputo\u27s A Rumor of War and Michael Herr\u27s Dispatches; and three works of fiction--David Halberstam\u27s One Very Hot Day, Tim O\u27Brien\u27s Going After Cacciato, and Stephen Wright\u27s Meditations in Green. My thesis illustrates how the tendency toward anthropomorphizing the landscape of Vietnam is manifested in each work and attempts to explain how and why this occurs. Finally, I explore the cultural assumptions and biases that inform these works and their presentations of an incarnated Vietnam