Reconstructing the Post-9/11 American War Narrative in Anthony Lappé’s Shooting War (2007), Ben Fountain’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (2012), and Kevin Powers’ The Yellow Birds (2012

Abstract

The unexpected destruction of the World Trade Center twin towers has taken the world by surprise and assumed an air of unreality. It is not only the unpredictability of the attacks that has made them seem unreal, but also their ability to shatter long established myths such as American exceptionalism and the untouchable state. Also, for Americans, the attacks have brought the media-driven narrative of terror to their own homeland. By virtue of those shock effects, the media have immediately risen up to compensate for the unrepresentable absence of reality following the attacks which have acquired a mystical aura of importance and reverence unquestionably allowing all sorts of narratives to be built around them. Hence, 9/11 has resulted in greying the area between the private memory and the public history, the virtual and the real, the trope and the image, the symbolic and the literal. Moreover, since 9/11 was closely related to all forms of art – film, music, literature… etc. – most artistic representations have become an extremely useful, yet challenging, political tool stressing the sense of loss and grief while subtly harnessing the public opinion towards a violent retaliation which finally paved the way for the notorious War on Terror. This explains why most 9/11 fiction has been criticized for its failure to adequately respond to the literary and ethical demands of the era and to address the events as a contextualized whole, not as traumatizing disintegrated parts, ii