This study analyses the representation of different ghosts in Anglophone novels taking place during Vietnam’s twentieth-century history and how the novels and ghosts challenge the dominant cultural...Show moreThis study analyses the representation of different ghosts in Anglophone novels taking place during Vietnam’s twentieth-century history and how the novels and ghosts challenge the dominant cultural narratives. Within this thesis, I argue that these ghosts are presented in different manners depending on how the novel challenges the dominant narrative and memory, whether the ghosts and characters in the novel enact the cultural norms in the United States or Vietnam, and which kind of haunting is observable in the novel. Regardless of these factors, the ghosts challenge the dominant collective narrative in a specific imagined community, a collection of communities as a whole, such as the dominant collective memory prevalent in the United States or Vietnam, or on a worldwide scale. The thesis focuses on the following three novels. The first of these novels is She Weeps Each Time You’re Born (Barry 2014), where ghosts are present as metaphysical entities that try to pass on into the afterlife through recounting their deaths whilst simultaneously introducing formerly silenced information and ghosts as unobservable entities where trauma and grief haunt the living. The second novel analysed is On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (Vuong 2020), which presents the intertextual ghosts that serve as metaphors as trauma influences the character’s everyday lives and the family becomes similar to a ghost due to their invisible existence in the United States after immigrating. The third novel is The Mountains Sing (Phan Quế Mai 2020), where a character nicknamed Wicked Ghost is similar to a metaphysical ghost and haunts the neighbourhood and protagonist’s family. Alongside the character nicknamed Wicked Ghost are the unobservable ghosts of trauma and grief which haunt the protagonist and her family, as well as the ghost as a metaphor for the absent presence of historical events institutionally forgotten. These novels discuss events before, during, and after the Vietnam War from the perspective of a Vietnamese author and Vietnamese characters, and all three novels include a variety of ghosts that are either metaphysical or intertextual. Thus far, little research has been done on such novels, as their increased representation is recent. This study then serves as a starting point for other academic research that might surround ghosts’ function in Anglophone literature on conflicts in Vietnam.Show less
