War memorials provide context for understanding the political and social landscape surrounding armed conflict while also allowing an opportunity to remember the individual sacrifice of those lost to the turmoil of war. This paper explores how authors of war literature similarly manipulate memory while recognizing the war dead. Specifically, it shows that Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, and Laurent Binet’s HHhH are literary memorials that use self-reflexive narratorial intrusions to consider the truth and meaning of combat while also acknowledging individual loss through a purposeful use of naming. These three novels were chosen for this study because they occupy a space between memoir and fiction, neither fully factual nor fully invented. These meta-fictional novels use their artificiality to impress upon their readers the importance of memory, particularly in remembering the individual cost of national conflict. Each of these novels exposes the complexities of storytelling and traumatic memory to their audience to explain how the manipulation of fact is a necessary part of expressing truth. At the same time, each novel strives to recognize the war dead by name, keeping them alive by telling their stories.
This paper is organized into two distinct sections. The first section examines each text as an example of meta-fiction, specifically highlighting the stylistic choices used by the authors to exhibit self awareness and to raise questions about truth. The second section reveals how intentional, reverent use of invented memory contrasted with specific assertions of authenticity establishes these novels as memorials to the real events and individuals portrayed. While there is a great deal of scholarship on the fictional memory of *The Things They Carried*, comparing it to the more recent novel *HHhH* and the more overtly fictional account in *Slaughterhouse-Five*, offers a new dimension to understanding each work individually.
About the presenterHannah K Williams
Hannah Williams received her B.S. from the United States Military Academy in 2008, with a dual major in Literature and European History. At this time she commissioned into the United States Army. During her career she has been stationed at Fort Campbell, KY and Fort Bragg, NC and deployed to Kandahar Province, Afghanistan from 2010-2011. Currently, Hannah Williams is an English M.A. student at North Carolina State University, studying American and British Literature.