Memories of the Lost War Memoir: Genre Subversion, Pilgrimage, and Reflections on Memoir in Tobias Wolff and Tim O’Brien

When a flood of literature creates a new genre, as in the 90s with personal accounts of the American War in Vietnam, the question of value demands attention. Value partially materializes from the cultural and literary context of a narrative, and the nineties brought a post-modern landscape littered with self-indulgent celebrity memoirs. Many scholars point to Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried as the most well-renowned and best-received piece of literature emergent out of Vietnam. Marlyin Wesley describes O’Brien’s metafiction as valuable because of its subversion of the American War Novel. Edward Linenthal pinpoints the confessional mode as a prime vessel for restructuring war tropes. Alex Vernon categorizes O’Brien’s fiction as haphazard spiritual pilgrimage through writing, epitomizing the moral ambiguity of Vietnam. Memoirs such as Tobias Wolff’s In Pharoah’s Army: Memories of the Lost War were initially received with fanfare and literary honors but over time dwindled into the background. While O’Brien explores the “truth” of traumatic memory through fiction, he misses what Wolff specializes in, the everyday banal corruption of the average soldier and the innate egoism of personal narrative. I argue Wolff’s memoir warrants a reassessment of its immediate reception and impact on the war narrative genre. Keywords: Confessional, spiritual pilgrimage, memoir, Vietnam, Tobias Wolff, Tim O’Brien, traumatic memory, personal narrative, genre subversion.