Displacing the Dominant Fiction: Historical Trauma, Psychic Disintegration, and the Anti-Heroic Real in Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18255267

Abstract

This essay critically examines Tim O’ Brien’s The Things They Carried as a literary site of resistance, positioning it against dominant narratives of heroism, national, and moral clarity characteristically associated with war. Drawing on Kaja Silverman’s theoretical notions of “dominant fiction” and “historical trauma” and Kali Tal’s insights into trauma literature and mythologization, the paper explores how O’ Brien disrupts the ideological coherence of war stories through emotionally fragmented, metafictional narratives. Key events, such as the deaths of two American military officers, Curt Lemon and Kiowa in Vietnam are analyzed to reveal how trauma, absurdity, and emotional incoherence disrupts the myth of noble national sacrifice. The paper argues that O’Brien’s narrative strategy displaces the sanitized war memory and offers instead a raw, unfiltered, anti-heroic counter-memory grounded in loss, fragmented reality, and the impossibility of closure.