A trauma artist : Tim O'Brien and the fiction of Vietnam / Mark A. Heberle.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 325-335) and index.

Introduction. Vietnam as Figure and Symptom: "We've All Been There" : A Trauma Artist ; The Fiction of Vietnam -- Fabricating Trauma : "The Vietnam in Me" ; O'Brien's Endless War ; Posttraumatic Stress Disorder and Vietnam ; PTSD and Writing ; O'Brien's Art of Trauma ; Writing Beyond Vietnam -- A Bad War : Origins of If I Die in a Combat Zone ; Fictionalized Testimony ; O'Brien's Self-Representation: Soldier Versus Writer ; Moral Combat ; Combat Zone as Source for a Career -- The Old Man and the Pond : Self-Displacement in Northern Lights ; Literary Mimicry: Realism, Symbolism, Allegory ; Harvey's Story: Vietnam as Tragicomedy ; Paul's Story: The Feminization of Virtue ; Novel Revisions -- A Soldier's Dream : The Re-covering of Trauma: Paul Berlin as Tim O'Brien ; Cacciato: From Short Stories to Trauma Narrative ; "Going After Cacciato": from Catalog to Breakdown ; Paul Berlin: From Breakdown to Trauma Writing ; The Quest for Cacciato: Fantasy and the Burial of the Dead ; The Observation Post: Retraumatization and Endless Fantasy -- The Bombs Are Real : An Ambitious Failure? ; The Traumatization of William Cowling ; Parabolic Fiction: Mutual Assured Destruction and Civil Defense ; The Nuclear Age and Vietnam ; The Failure of William Cowling -- True War Stories : Recirculated Trauma, Endless Fiction ; The Things They Carried as Self-Revision ; "How to Tell a True War Story": Misreading Tim O'Brien ; Other Refabrications of Trauma ; "The Lives of the Dead": Bringing Them Back Alive -- The People We Kill : Trauma, Tragedy, National Disgrace ; Metafictional Investigations ; The Breakdown of John Wade ; Tragic Revisions ; John Wade as Paradigm and Persona: Tim O'Brien's Trauma ; Psychobiography, History, and Fiction -- Guys Just Want to Have Fun : Vietnam and the Age of Clinton ; A Dictionary of Love ; In Defense of Thomas Chippering ; PTSD as Comedy/Vietnam as Parody ; Saving Tim O'Brien: Tomcat in Love as Countertherapy -- Conclusion. A Trauma Artist : Posttraumatic Nation ; Academic Polemics ; Responsible Dreams -- Appendix. Diagnostic Criteria for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, DSM-IV.

A Trauma Artist examines how O'Brien's works variously rewrite his own traumatization during the war in Vietnam as a never-ending fiction that paradoxically "recovers" personal experience by both recapturing and (re)disguising it. Mark Heberle considers O'Brien's career as a writer through the prisms of post-traumatic stress disorder, postmodernist metafiction, and post-World War II American political uncertainties and public violence.

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