Flanking Maneuvers: The Counternarratives of the Military Unconscious in Phil Klay's “After Action Report” and “War Stories”

Abstract

This article examines the ways in which Phil Klay’s short stories “After Action Report” and “War Stories” generate counternarratives that challenge and fragment populist representations of soldiering, war, and Americanness. In doing so, the analysis reveals new ways of approaching the contemporary American civilian-military disconnect. The article examines this disconnect in a framework based on Fredric Jameson’s theories that reveals the text’s underlying military unconscious: a type of political unconscious that rises from the lived-in social realities of veterans and active duty personnel. The military unconscious is complemented by what I term the hegemonic soldier: the ideological construct which informs the dominant cultural representations of soldiering and war, and which reinforces itself through representations in a fashion similar to the idea of nostalgic recreation.

By applying these concepts, the analysis can uncover the counternarratives that stem from the texts’ military unconscious. The first case study examines the ways in which Klay’s “After Action Report” ruptures the military institution’s hegemonic discourse of killing by providing alternative discourses that allow the soldier subject to resist the hegemonic soldier, and reassert ownership over their experiences. The second case study examines how “War Stories” reveals and critiques the latent presence of the hegemonic soldier in contemporary American society. The hegemonic soldier is shown to be an omnipresent force that appears even in narratives that seek to subvert it. Together, the case studies demonstrate veteran literature’s unique potential in understanding the development of contemporary American culture.