SOURCE: "Narrative Strategies in Recent Vietnam War Fiction," in America Rediscovered: Critical Essays on Literature and Film of the Vietnam War, edited by Owen W. Gilman, Jr. and Lorrie Smith, Garland Publishing, Inc., 1990, pp. 100-08.

[In the following essay, Durham discusses point-of-view in three novels about Vietnam veterans—Larry Heinemann's Paco's Story, Philip Caputo's Indian Country, and Bobbie Ann Mason's In Country.]

Literature of the Vietnam War, since it concerns experiences most readers have not personally lived through, must face an initial obstacle in engaging not only our interest, but more crucially our participation, in constructing its singular reality. As in all literary encounters, communication between writer and audience is a result of their active partnership, but Vietnam may be an especially difficult environment to share in that it is not only excessively foreign to most of us, but it may also be intensely painful. The war is...