THE EXPERIENCE OF WAR AND THE SEARCH FOR IDENTITY IN US NARRATIVES OF WORLD WAR I AND WORLD WAR II

The essay introduces a comparison between American novels written before the two World Wars, emphasising the diverse approaches, styles and prevailing themes. While WWI novels bear witness to war but, most important, admit the difficulties in finding a voice to give to it, because this new war annuls all preceding categories of identification, makes language lose its meaning. They will produce a formal reconsideration that will be in debt to the new avant-gardes, and to new forms of communication. WWII American narrative, instead, develops different understandings of the world experience and can be grouped in two strong weaves: the first one, that could be defined as he heroic or the epic phase, is the one that comprehends the works usually defined as ‘novels of command’, characterized by a traditional rendering of the war experience. The second wave is the one that, instead, retrieves the experimental character and offers interpretative keys that are closer to those already used for the novels following WWI. As the American nation is involved in new wars that are decidedly awkward and harshly contested both domestically and abroad, in the western block itself, experimenting formally helps to deconstruct, to dismantle by means of a new, juxtaposing, paradoxical way of writing the experience of war seen simply as a strategy for solving international problems.