Postcolonial Trauma in David Bergen’s The Time in Between

Studies of postcolonial trauma investigate Cathy Caruth’s contention that traumatic psychopathology, by virtue of its universality, can bridge cultural difference. David Bergen’s The Time in Between tests this theory in relation to the Vietnam War. Bergen’s novel recognizes trauma as an effective, though limited, vehicle of cultural reconciliation that ultimately needs to be supplemented by further discursive resistance. Although the novel’s treatment of trauma resists Orientalist representations of Vietnam, forms of parallelism point to tacit cultural fissures, which are countered through narrative self-reflexivity and the frustration of what Edward Said terms the “exteriority of representation.”