Warring fictions : cultural politics and the Vietnam war narrative

In the narrative prose of the Vietnam War--specifically Graham Greene's The Quiet American, Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, Philip Caputo's A Rumor of War, and Bobbie Ann Mason's In Country--as well as in the critical responses to this prose, two vital facts about the war have been overlooked. (1) Concentrating on the American experience, authors and critics have demonstrated an ignorance of and indifference toward the suffering of the Vietnamese; and (2) by focusing on the individual experiences of veterans, these writers have failed to place the war within the framework of U.S. imperialism and global capitalism. Despite critics' frequent assertions about its radical aesthetics and anti-war politics, the narrative prose of the Vietnam War has consistently neglected both the commercial/geopolitical motivation behind and the dreadful consequences of the Vietnam War