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.
Based on recent conversations with O'Brien, previously published interviews, and new readings of all his works through 1999, this book is the first study to concentrate on the role and representation of trauma as the central focus of all O'Brien's works, whether situated in Vietnam, in post-Vietnam America, or in the imagination of protagonists suspended between the two. By doing so, Heberle redefines O'Brien as a major U.S. writer of the late twentieth century whose representations of self-damaging experiences and narratives of recovery characterize not only the war in Vietnam but also relationships between fathers and sons and men and women in the post-traumatic culture of the contemporary United States.
鈥淎 truly praiseworthy work鈥擧eberle manages to combine biographical, psychological, and historical criticism and analysis in convincing analytical and synthetic ways鈥n enlightening journey through the life and works of a key voice in contemporary American literature.鈥濃擳homas Myers, author of Walking Point: American Narratives of Vietnam
鈥淣o one after Heberle will probably ever read O'Brien's texts as thoroughly or meticulously as he has from start to finish, and no one will probably need to鈥t will become, I suspect, the standard exegetical text as well.鈥濃擯hilip Beidler, author of American Literature and the Experience of Vietnam and Re-Writing America: Vietnam Authors in Their Generation
鈥淗eberle's analysis, because of its thoroughness and its ability to demonstrate the larger human concerns of O'Brien's works, will undoubtedly have a positive influence on O'Brien's reputation as one of our prominent contemporary American authors.鈥濃擝ryant Armstrong, Modern Fiction
