Throughout his career, O'Brien has alternated between narratives primarily set in Vietnam and narratives primarily set in the United States, with If I Die, Going After Cacciato and The Things They Carried being followed respectively by Northern Lights, The Nuclear Age and In the Lake of the Woods. This alternation has only ceased with O'Brien's two most recent novels, Tomcat in Love and July, July, which are both very dark, often grotesque comedies, like The Nuclear Age before them. Unlike The Nuclear Age, and unlike O'Brien's other American novels, though, these two later texts do not immediately engage with the symbolic resonance of the American wilderness, but rather concentrate on the psychological journey of their protagonists, whose lives unfold for the most part against a metropolitan or suburban background. Regardless of their actual environment, however, O'Brien's characters share one fundamental trait: from the autobiographical narrator of If I Die to the variegated, dysfunctional cast of the ‘Class of ‘69’ in July, July, they all experience the loss of their physical and/or moral coordinates. It is true that, whether set primarily on home ground or ‘in country’, O'Brien's narratives all return imaginatively to Vietnam: even in The Nuclear Age, the only novel not to include amongst its protagonists a veteran from the war, the main character's life is significantly shaped by his decision not to answer the draft call. And yet, as already adumbrated at the beginning of this study, in a way Vietnam can be read as a landscape of the mind, a metaphor for the mysterious, and often treacherous, psychological terrain that we must navigate in our progress through life, constantly facing, as we all do, intellectual, emotional and moral quandaries, whether consciously or otherwise.

In the pursuit of his role as a postmodern mythographer, O'Brien has also made clever use of the symbolic potential of the American settings in his novels; they provide an interesting counterpart to – and, some may argue, a much needed equivalent of – an analogous figurative take on the alien Vietnamese territory. O'Brien is certainly not the first American writer to exploit the mythical connotations of the geography of his land.