Vietnam War

Challenging the postcolonial studies focus on trauma, memory, and identity, this study instead draws on the concept of alienation in Marxist theory to analyze the ideological transformations of four representative soldiers in Duong Thu Huong’s Novel Without a Name (1995) and Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer (2015). This paper examines the different forms of alienation experienced by selected soldiers within the context of North Vietnamese society and its military system. It aims to analyze how these experiences of alienation influence their decisions and actions, and how the soldiers respond to the oppression that caused the alienation. Using a structural analogy method, the paper applies Marx’s four aspects of alienation—the product of labor, the process of labor, others, and self—within the socio-political context during the Vietnam War and its aftermath. This study finds that those loyal, patriotic, and innocent Vietnamese soldiers, driven by a sincere desire to rebuild their state, were exploited by the political ambitions of Viet Cong leaders and shaped by the long-term indoctrination of Vietnamese communist ideology, which led to their gradual alienation from their ideology. By highlighting ideological alienation rather than trauma or memory, this research offers a new critical lens on communist military narratives and expands Marxist literary criticism within postcolonial studies.

Trauma studies mainly focus on the psychological mechanisms of trauma and the various ways witnesses and victims represent it. But recent approaches in the field emphasize that despite doubts about the accuracy of traumatic memories, trauma narratives could point to the socio-political issues involved because they reflect the dominant societal discourses, and connect the text to history and ideology. As such, literary narratives can potentially depict traumatic events as non-political experiences, obscure their connections to power dynamics, and “depoliticize” these events. As a result, power structures are validated, and challenges to the root causes and consequences of trauma are prevented. To identify the patterns and possibilities of depoliticization in war narratives, this article examines four nationally acclaimed literary works about the Korean and Vietnam wars, written by American veterans. Employing a combination of theoretical frameworks from trauma studies alongside Norman Fairclough and Ruth Wodak’s models in critical discourse analysis, the research identified and categorized instances of depoliticization to show how they reflect or conceal broader historical and sociopolitical contexts. The results reveal that although these narratives appear to be anti-war, they conform to the dominant discourses of their time by downplaying, manipulating, or omitting political references—i.e., through depoliticization of the narrative. Given that depoliticized trauma narratives can diminish or obscure political responsibility, this study opens up extensive prospects for deeper examination of the relationship between the representation of trauma and political power. Ultimately, the findings emphasize the importance of a critical approach to analyzing trauma narratives and war literature.