Ernest Hemingway, Kurt Vonnegut ve Tim O'Brien'ın savaş romanlarında travma ve yabancılaşma

The subject of this dissertation involves American war novels which have a distinctive and significant place in American literature. When considered as a literary genre, war novels appear as texts that convey the war experiences of both soldiers and civilians, and discuss the effects of war on individuals and society in various aspects. Looking at the recent history of American literature; especially in the transition from romanticism to realism and modernism to postmodernism; the literature revolving around American Civil War, the First World War, the Second World War and Vietnam War has great significance. Moreover, the difficulty and even the impossibility of the narrative of the traumatized individual's experience has been reflected in war novels, and the authors have used different styles and developed their own authentic literary formulas to overcome this obstacle. War experience and trauma bring along social and self alienation. Individuals have been isolated from their own self and/or society and this has led them to question many philosophical, existential and social issues of life. In this context, the American war novels including Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, set in the First World War; Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, set in the Second World War; and Tim O'Brien's Going After Cacciato, set in the Vietnam War have been breakthrough works among their contemporaries. In the light of the classic philological and literary approach, the concepts of trauma and alienation are the key scopes to analyze the novels mentioned above. In this sense, the paradigm of trauma and alienation form the theoretical basis of this dissertation. These three American war novels, written in different literary styles and set in different battles, reveal the individual experiences upon the social context in the scope of their shared foundations of trauma and alienation.