The Veteran Who Is, the Boy Who is No More: the Casualty of Identity in War Fiction

Despite the discovery of Post-traumatic Stress Disorder in the late 1970s, the phenomenon is hardly new. Modernist writers such as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry Green, and in later years J. D. Salinger wrote extensively of the most assured and costly casualty of war: the soldier's self. This dissertation examines how the great writers of the World Wars have already told readers of the costs of war and in doing so have presented accounts that are far simpler yet more profound than modern interpretations. The problem with understanding these accounts of trauma is that they come from societies where the explicit reference to the psychological devastation of war was strictly forbidden, thus leaving the rerader to infer the true costs. Only in understanding the modern psychological interpretations of trauma studies can one reread these authors and understand what was truly written and understand that war's cost has always been recorded in literature, even though it typically has been left for the discerning reader to infer.