The Vietnam War destroyed the traditional narrative paradigms of the war novel.

Evidence

This first terrible postmodernist war cannot be told in any of the traditional paradigms of the war novel or movie — indeed, that breakdown of all previous narrative paradigms is, along with the breakdown of any shared language through which a veteran might convey such experience, among the principle subjects of the book and may be said to open up the place of a whole new reflexivity. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 147

Categorization

• SEED: The claim that a historical event can break narrative paradigms entirely — that new experience demands new form — is an essay angle on why each generation’s wars need new storytelling.