Narrative Identity After Combat

Narrative Identity After Combat Synopsis

Narrative Identity After Combat offers a new theoretical framework for interpreting contemporary British military life writing as public post-trauma narratives. Focusing on works published between 1994 and 2019, it investigates how military author-narrators recount and reconfigure their experiences of war and trauma to construct coherent, culturally resonant, and publicly acceptable life stories. Guided by the question of how published autobiographical storytelling enables soldiers and veterans to (re-) establish a stable narrative identity after combat, the study brings cognitive and cultural narratology into conversation with narrative identity theory and trauma studies.

Drawing on twenty-eight autobiographies and memoirs, this book identifies a range of narrative strategies^-^such as self-heroification, the moral reframing of traumatic events, collective identity construction, and the use of cultural models of narrative identity^-^to support the perception of a consistent, agentic self over time. Autobiographical narration emerges not only as a literary practice but as a psychological and ethical process of self-authorship and meaning making.

In this context, military memoirs function as coherence-building mechanisms that help individuals negotiate the emotional and moral dissonances of their past and reclaim a sense of identity disrupted by trauma through publicly accessible narratives. The study explores the cultural and therapeutic relevance of military autobiographical storytelling while emphasising the unique pressures that come with narrating war experiences for public audiences.

By bridging narratology, the medical humanities, and narrative psychology, this book advances a broader understanding of how published narratives function as cognitive tools for personal resilience, ethical positioning, and social integration in post-traumatic contexts.