The Unhomed Vietnam Veteran: “Queer Houses” in Tim O’Brien’s Vietnam Works

Abstract

One of the most recurrent tropes in the US fiction emerging out of the experience of the war in Vietnam is the description of the feeling of estrangement of the soldiers. Up against a hostile and unreadable background, deprived of the tools to read the geographical and human landscapes, most returning veterans describe their feelings of alienation and constant fear. Once back in the US, most found that their feeling of unease and estrangement did not subside. Because of this, most of the fiction written by veteran soldiers directly or indirectly tackles the issues of home, homesickness, homelessness, and being unhomed. I argue that the centrality of these issues can be read as a commentary on the strategies of inclusion and exclusion which characterize the definition of the nation as home. One of the ways Vietnam War fiction has represented the issue of homelessness and estrangement from the homeland has been to resort to one of the most pervasive metaphors in US literature: that of the imperfect, crumbling haunted house. A great number of the houses featured in Vietnam War literature are imperfect and uncanny. The main aim of this article is the contextualization and analysis of the “queer” houses in Tim O’Brien’s fiction as a trope that allows the author to build a “poetics of uprootedness.”