The Novel and War

Abstract

The twentieth century saw two World Wars and two other significant Asian conflicts with military participation by the United States. Although none of these wars took place on American soil, they entrained millions of US soldiers in combat. Of these conflicts, World War II, with its 78 million casualties over a four‐year period, was the most traumatic. Although the necessity of military conflict to halt German genocidal aggression and brutal Japanese militarism remains relatively uncontroversial, the extent and scope of human and national destruction continue to stagger the imagination. Literature, practiced to represent individual trauma and tragedy, remains largely unprepared to address killing and wounding in such large numbers. Holocaust writers have struggled with this difficulty for decades, a challenge that has become more and more acute as recognition of the event's scope and cruelty has grown and solidified over time. But in spite of the war's necessity, the excesses, corruptions, and illogicality of militarism often led to cynical accounts that were conveyed through generic subversions and inventions by American novelists. American novels of World War I, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War will here bracket the more extended discussion of American World War II fiction, and will focus largely on novels of combat written by author‐veterans. Here, especially, the dark, comic vision of many American war novels manifests an understanding that words were inadequate to World War II unless they were transformed into radically challenging signs and gestures.