Representations of War Trauma in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun and Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried

War literature across different national contexts shares a preoccupation with the psychological and ethical dimensions of violence, and a comparison of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun and Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried illuminates how fiction processes collective and personal trauma from the Nigerian Civil War and the Vietnam War respectively. This study examined how both authors construct narratives that challenge the heroic mythology of war while foregrounding the silenced experiences of those who suffer most from armed conflict. A trauma theory methodology was applied alongside postcolonial and feminist literary criticism. Adichie's multi-perspective Biafran narrative is read alongside O'Brien's meta-fictional Vietnam memoir to explore how both texts perform the instability of memory and the inadequacy of linear narrative for capturing wartime experience. Both texts explicitly problematise the act of storytelling about war, drawing attention to the gap between lived experience and narrative representation. The analysis revealed that while O'Brien's postmodern meta-fictional strategies foreground the writer's moral responsibility, Adichie focuses on the domestic and feminine dimensions of wartime experience that official histories typically exclude. Ugwu's transformation from household servant to soldier represents a particularly powerful narrative of how ordinary lives are conscripted into historical catastrophe. The study recommends this comparative reading for undergraduate seminars in departments at universities in the South East zone, where the Biafran War context provides rich contextual depth for students.

Keywords: war trauma, Adichie, O'Brien, Biafran War, trauma narrative