The Ghosts of War: Writing Trauma

This chapter explores representations of ghosts in memoirs, short stories and novels, that are not contained within familiar plots. These ghosts are problematic to explain and typically represent moments of traumatic crisis in accounts of the war by Blunden, Graves, Sassoon, Brittain (among other memoirs discussed in this chapter), and various novels and short stories. Such ghosts personify no-man’s-land as a liminal zone associated with both death and life. These ghosts sit outside the narrative demands of the ghost story and appear as lost, or without a role, and so challenge the possibility of coherent meaning. They are not ghosts who can be brought back to life within domestic spaces. The lack of a literary plot for the aimless ghost implicates a failure in narrative composition. That failure is reflected in self-conscious meditations upon the problem of writing about the experience of war.