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type of event in the novel that hardly lends itself, if at all, to becoming fact, it is inarguably death.
Death is a constant, casual presence throughout the narrative. The narrator catalogues the names of eight dead comrades in the first seven sentences in the opening paragraph, and the ominous understatement at the beginning of the novel, “It was a bad time,” will be repeated several times thereafter, whenever scenes of extreme violence are described. The matter-of-fact tone of the narrative, which accounts for a certain degree of psychic numbing on the narrator’s and on the main character’s parts, also suggests a sort of moral “vacuum” for lack of “conceptual supplies” (Doc Peret’s phrases). One cannot possibly have order in a vacuum, without any substance. However, in any war, death becomes its own purpose, and in O’Brien’s novel, Lieutenant Sidney Martin is fascinated by it. What appeals to him is “the chance to confront death many times”; he believes in war as “a means of confronting ending itself, many repeated endings” (166). And yet, his ending can never be mentioned because it can be neither real nor imaginable; fratricide is too horrendous an act to understand and to remember. In the moral fog of war, good and evil are difficult to tell apart, and O’Brien does not take sides in the conundrum exactly because of the lack of order, purpose, and meaning in his narrator’s memories.
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Writing horror is more than a gratuitous experiment in literary form: it combines creativity and political activism, as well as a genuine moral engagement founded on empathy, responsibility, and ultimately the courage to face what reason has refused to capture in an ordered stream of signification, and what official public discourse has marginalized as an “inappropriate” topic. While vicarious traumatization is usually what prompts a trauma narrative, the act of storytelling itself, by ordering facts into a coherent history, becomes an act of witnessing. Kaplan associates the term “witnessing” with “prompting an ethical response that will perhaps transform the way someone views the world, or thinks about justice.” In the theorist’s view, “witnessing leads to a broader