The Impact of Trauma on Vietnamese Refugees in Robert Olen Butler’s A Good Scent from A Strange Mountain (1992) and Viet Thanh Nguyen The Refugees (2017)

المؤلف

قسم اللغة الانجليزية، کلية الاداب، جامعة أسيوط

المستخلص

After the collapse of the South Vietnamese government, thousands of people fled away from their own country. Eventually, by the late 1980s and early 1990s, many individuals made their way to the United States in order to escape intolerable conditions in their countries and to seek a better life. There were three waves of Vietnamese immigration; the most significant and complicated was the third wave, which came after 1982; it included different types of Vietnamese refugees. This paper attempts to study the challenges Vietnamese refugees have faced in the U.S. Selected stories from the collections of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain (1992) by Robert Olen Butler, and The Refugees (2017) by Viet Thanh Nguyen, will be studied in the light of the refugee trauma theory. The Vietnam War was a unique war in history and, thus, called for an equally distinctive representation in literature. The stories, in both collections, are connected by the common experience of characters that have survived the war in Vietnam and found their way to America. Both writers offer a diverse group of characters—some protagonists are Vietnamese, others are American, but most are Vietnamese-American. Through the different stories of their characters, Butler and Nguyen explore questions of identity. They focus on how it feels and what it means to be a refugee. They demonstrate as well the different ways by which refugees respond to their traumatic experiences.

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