Goodbye to All That Again

• Main Author: Von Nordheim, Charles Bradley
• Format: Others
• Published: CSUSB ScholarWorks 2016
• Subjects: Military Veterans; Jung; Zeitgeist; Hero; Post Traumatic Stress; Civilian Reintegration; Fiction
• Online Access: https://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/etd/386; https://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1431&context=etd

Goodbye to All That Again concerns the odyssey of an Iraq War veteran who must complete his journey past desert combat and academic strife in order to reclaim his heroic identity. The novel uses a fragmented storytelling mode that offers readers thirteen years of the protagonist’s timeline in a nonlinear sequence. Through this technique, the novel evokes the cognitive disassociation experienced by individuals who suffer Post Traumatic Stress and echoes the postmodern practices employed by American military novelists such as Joseph Heller and Tim O’Brien for the last sixty years. GOODBYE TO ALL THAT AGAIN seeks to intervene in the discourse of the American war novel by updating the depiction of military members from unwilling draftees, the situation Heller and O’Brien portray, to that of career-driven volunteers. The novel also considers adjustment concerns raised by the political correctness movement, a bar to civilian reintegration unknown by prior generations of veterans. In doing so, the writer hopes to adjust the zeitgeist, a major concern of his practice as detailed in his STATEMENT OF PURPOSE, toward a more accurate representation of military members so that society can more effectively meet their needs.