The De-realized Self in Tim O’Brien’s In the Lake of the Woods

Authors

  • Ban Salah Shaalan University of Baghdad/ College of Languages/ English Department

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.31973/aj.v1i132.776

Keywords:

My Lai, massacre, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), Trauma, Flies, John Wade

Abstract

Since war has become the foreign policy to solve international crises, and since violent occurrences of all sorts, natural catastrophes, killing,  abuse and rape are threatening the world with unseen wounds affecting it physically, emotionally and mentally. Trauma and mental disorders have taken the interest of psychiatry, psychoanalysis, sociology and literature. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PSTD), in particular, has managed to create a pedagogic (scholastic) bond between literature and psychology to reach a full understanding of this mental disorder and to cure what has been considered a phenomenon of trauma. The present paper attempts to apply Cathy Caruth’s reading of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in her book: Trauma: Exploration in Memory (1995) on Tim O’Brien’s novel In the Lake of the Woods (1994).The novel traces the psychological references of the traumatized John Wade’s unusual war experience that goes beyond the range of human awareness and renders him to be in a devastating mental haze.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

References

Berger, John. (1972). Ways of Seeing . London: Penguin.

Caruth, Cathy. (1995). Trauma and Experience: Introduction. In Cathy Caruth (Ed.). Trauma: Explorations in Memory. (pp.3-12). Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins Press.

Herman, Judith. (1992). Trauma and Revenge: The Aftermath of Violence- From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. New York: Basic Books.

Kowalczuk, Barbara.(2014). My Lai’s “Fucking flies!”: The Stigmata of Trauma in Tim O’Brien’s In the Lake of the Woods. War, Literature , and the Arts.Vol.26 , 1-14. Retrieved July, 7, 2019.

Mahini, T., Barth E., & Morrow J., (2018). Tim O’Brien’s “Bad” Vietnam War: In the Lake of the Woods & Its Historical Perspective. Theory and Practice in Language Studies. Vol. 8, No. 12, 1582-1594. https://dx.doi.org/10.17507/tpls.0812.03.

O’Brien ,Tim. (1994). In the Lake of the Woods. New York: Mariner Books.
Piwinski, David J. (2000). My Lai , Flies , and Beelzebub in Tim O’Brien’s In the Lake of the Woods. War, Literature, and the Arts: An International Journal Of Humanities .12.2, 196-202.

Worthington, Marjorie. (2009). The Democratic Meta-Narrator In In the Lake of the Woods. Explicator 67.2, 120- 123.https://doi.org/10.3200/EXPL.67.2
Tyson, L. (2006). Critical Theory Today: A User - Friendly Guide (2nd ed.). New York: Taylor & Francis Group.

Young, William. (2006). Missing in Action: Vietnam and Sadism in Tim O’Brien’s In the Lake of the Woods. Midwest Quarterly 47. 2 , 131-143.

Downloads

Published

2020-03-15

Issue

Section

Other studies

How to Cite

The De-realized Self in Tim O’Brien’s In the Lake of the Woods. (2020). Al-Adab Journal, 1(132), 113-124. https://doi.org/10.31973/aj.v1i132.776

Publication Dates

Similar Articles

1-10 of 113

You may also start an advanced similarity search for this article.