Magical Realism in Tim O'Brien's Vietnam War Fiction
Autor
Schramer, JamesFecha
1999Resumen
Although Tim O’Brien has denied the literary influence of Gabriel
García Márquez and Jorge Luis Borges and their versions of “magical
realism” on his work, he has produced a body of work about the American
experience in Vietnam that corresponds closely to what Alejo
Carpentier referred to in his preface to his first novel, El reino de este
mundo (The Kingdom of This World, 1949), as lo real maravilloso
americano. This essay argues that O’Brien’s “magical realism” is not
the result of a traceable literary heritage; it is, rather, the product of
social and political conditions in the United States that began with
American political and military hegemony after World War II and continued
up to and beyond its defeat in Vietnam. Living with the memory
of a war he did not want to fight is difficult enough for O’Brien. It is
even more difficult for him to live in a country whose leaders continue
to deny American culpability in that war. For O’Brien, the magical and
marvelous are more than stylistic tricks; they are his means of not only
escaping but also of exposing the reality of a war conducted by those
who proclaimed they had to destroy in order to save, who insisted on
the “plausibility of denial.”