Seen through a Deserter’s Eyes: Gendered Land of Vietnam in Robert Olen Butler’s The Alleys of Eden

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During America’s War with Vietnam, the Southeast Asian country was conventionally imagined as an extension of the western frontier, where American males were expected to demonstrate their manhood commensurate with their mythic fathers’, by engaging in a fierce battle with Indian-like Vietnamese guerrillas. If American authors write stories of GIs who escape the Vietnamese battlefield, can we assume that, in so doing, they in effect attempt to create a sort of counter-myth that challenge America’s conventional ideas about masculinity, heroism, and war deriving from the frontier mythology? With this question in mind, in this paper, I will read Robert Olen Butler’s first novel TheAlleys of Eden (1981), which narrates the story of Clifford Wilkes, who deserts the Vietnam War battleground and stays in the streets of Saigon as a fugitive with his Vietnamese lover Lanh. Like the protagonists of several other U.S.Vietnam War narratives, Butler’s hero initially comes to the Vietnam, motivated by a kind of anti-modern impulse that romanticizes the GIs’ strenuous ways of life in the uncivilized landscapes. Closely looking at Butler’s descriptions of the landscapes and people of Vietnam seen through the protagonist’s eyes, I contend that Butler’s deserter-hero sees the uncivilized Vietnamese terrain as a “time free” frontier untouched by the harmful effects of the corrupt American cities, where he can forget his earlier frustrating experiences at home, and be reborn as an innocent youth. However, the protagonist’s actions and its terrible consequences lead him to face the harsh realities of the war that compels him to give up his initial illusions about Vietnam, and make him desert both the Army and the battlefield. Examining the ways in which the protagonist’s perception of Vietnam and its people drastically changes throughout his prolonged journey across the Vietnamese landscapes, I conclude that Butler’s novel about an American deserter succeeds in formulating a cogent critique of America’s ethnocentric discourse that represents Vietnam as an update of the mythicfrontier.

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  • 人文研紀要

    人文研紀要 100 1-36, 2021-09-30

    中央大学人文科学研究所

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