Absence, Loss, and the Ripple Effects of War

Abstract

War has always been a central theme in literature as a whole, and particularly in the case of trauma related literature, which focuses on investigating the effects that trauma, and therefore war, have on the psychology and development of individuals. In this article, I propose two recent trauma novels of the Asian American literary tradition (The Surrendered by Chang-Rae Lee and On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong), which I use as case studies in order to explore the ripple effects of war (in particular loss, absence, and intergenerational trauma) on the lives of two characters, June Han and Little Dog, whose lives the novels depict from their childhood and into their adulthood. In this context I analyze post-war life both following direct exposure to war (June), and indirect exposure (Little Dog), uncovering thus how the trauma produced by wars haunts an individual all throughout their life, even after the danger of the war is seemingly over, and how the suffering produced during the war mutates and de- volves into different types of post-war suffering.