SOURCE: "Literary Sense-Making: American Vietnam Fiction," in Vietnam Images: War and Representation, edited by Jeffrey Walsh and James Aulich, The Macmillan Press, Ltd., 1989, pp. 123-40.

[Hölbling is the author of The Discourse of War in Recent American Novels (1987). In the following essay, he discusses the different types of literary responses the Vietnam war has engendered and relates them to American cultural myths and previous war literature.]

Since 1941 the United States has been more-or-less continuously involved in a series of military conflicts around the world. The resulting public awareness of war has contributed to the production of an ever-growing number of fictional accounts that deal with war or war-like situations. One of the assumptions of this essay is that stories of war display essential cultural concepts, expectations and self-images more prominently than other kinds of fiction, as the extreme situation of war provides occasions for scrutinising and putting...