Negotiating Heroism in Ben Fountain's Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk

Year 2022, , 251 - 261, 30.12.2022

M Ikbal M Alosman , Yasser Sabtan

https://doi.org/10.37093/ijsi.1107933

Abstract

This paper examines Ben Fountain’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk apropos heroism/post-heroism within the context of the 2003 Iraq War. The paper aims to uncover the novel’s approach to soldiers’ behavior on the battlefield, their perspectives on war, and how the American public interacts with their endeavors. While heroism celebrates acts of bravery and chivalry, post-heroism signals the decline of heroic ethos in the context of war, where soldiers are left to question the actual value of sacrifice on the battlefield. We make the argument through two constructs: “unheroic actions,” which addresses soldiers’ behavior in war, and “clash of perceptions,” which discusses soldiers’ versus the public’s perspectives on heroism and war. Though the novel’s setting serves to celebrate soldiers’ gallant feet in war, Fountain ridicules such heroic rhetoric throughout the novel and demonstrates how soldiers are reluctant to accept the public overenthusiasm about war and their status as war heroes.

Keywords

heroism, Iraq War, post-heroism, war novel, Ben Fountain

References

• Alosman, M. I. M. (2020). Tarnished heroes: Faces of war in American fiction. Şarkiyat: Journal of Oriental Scientific Research, 12(3), 1016–1026.
• Alosman, M. I. M. (2021). Grievable and un-grievable lives: Phil Klay’s redeployment. Humanitas- International Journal of Social Sciences, 9(17), 30–44.
• Barta, D. (2015). Veterans and “Innocensus” in Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk and the Yellow Birds. In P. Petrovic (Ed.), Representing 9/11: Trauma, Ideology, and Nationalism in Literature, Film, and Television (pp. 79–92). Rowman & Littlefield.
• Beck, J. (2009). Dirty wars: Landscape, power, and waste in western American literature. Lincoln University of Nebraska Press.
• Blazer, A. (2015). Logos cowboys: Postmodern football and post-postmodern war in Don DeLillo's End Zone and Fountain's Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk [Conference session]. South East Coastal Conference on Languages & Literatures (SECCLL). Georgia, United States. https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/seccll/2015/2015/40
• Coker, C. (2002). Waging war without warriors? The changing culture of military conflict. Lynne Rienner Publishers.
• Coker, C. (2007). The warrior ethos: Military culture and the war on terror. Routledge.
• Coker, C. (2014). Men at war: What fiction tells us about conflict, from The Iliad to Catch-22. Oxford University Press.
• Dyer, G. (2012, May 20). Americaʼs team. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/20/books/review/billy-lynns-long-halftime-walk-by-ben-fountain.html
• Fountain, B. (2012). Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk. Harper Collins Publishers.
• Gregory, D. (2004). The colonial present. Blackwell.
• James, W. (1971). The moral equivalent of war, and other essays. Harper & Row.
• Johnston, C. (2017). Postwar reentry narratives in Leslie Marmon Silko’s ceremony and Ben Fountain’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk. Studies in the Novel, 49(3), 400–418.
• Kaiserman, A. (2021). Unreality in America: Reading Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk in a post-truth age. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 62(5), 574–585.
• Luttwak, E. N. (1995). Toward post-heroic warfare. Foreign Affairs, 74(3), 109–22.
• O’Brien, S. (2021). Trauma and fictions of the “War on Terror”: Disrupting memory. Routledge.
• Ryan, C. (2014). The Dilemma of cosmopolitan soldiering. In S. Scheipers (Ed.), Heroism and the changing character of war: Toward post-heroic warfare? (pp. 120–141). Palgrave Macmillan.
• Scheipers, S. (2014). Introduction: Toward post-heroic warfare? In S. Scheipers (Ed.), Heroism and the changing character of war: Toward post-heroic warfare? (pp. 1–18). Palgrave Macmillan.
• Scranton, R. (2015, January 25). The Trauma Hero: From Wilfred Owen to Reemployment and American Sniper. Los Angeles Review of Books, 25. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/trauma-hero-wilfred-owen-redeployment-american-sniper
• Tait, T. (2012, July 6). Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain – review. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/jul/06/billy-lynn-ben-fountain-review
• Williams, B. (2017). The soldier-celebrity in Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk. Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 59(4), 524–47.
• Yanyu, Z. (2017). Transnational landscape and politics in three American Iraqi novels. Foreign Literature, 01, 120–131.