Another characteristic of the modern war novel genre is the protagonist's constant propensity to make witness, to offer detailed accounts of minutiae, again as a coping mechanism to gain control over the chaos of war and to offer more than a story of loss by creating a story of survival. On a basic level, O'Brien's novel converses with and butts up against these generic themes.
Within the larger genre of war narratives is the Vietnam War genre. Copious amounts of Vietnam War-related fiction, non-fiction, and film proliferated after the war and in the mid-1980s, and events such as the creation of the Vietnam War Memorial helped to create public interest in talking about the Vietnam War. While this sub-genre refers to the more generic war literature genre, it possesses more particular attributes, deriving from the nature of the Vietnam War, that set it apart, such as wastefulness and failure.
The emergence of the Vietnam War genre coincided with a historical moment that gave rise to its searching reflexivity — as the first wave of post-Vietnam War literature and films were written and released, national morale was at a low. The nation that had struggled with the Vietnam War had also faced the Watergate scandal and now an economic downturn. The government was scrutinized and its infallibility continually interrogated by the public. Perhaps a parallel effect can be seen as writers, many of who were combatants, attempted to voice their feelings of love, anger, and disenchantment.
