“I Was Ready For a Mending”: Rhetorics of Trauma and Recovery in Doug Peacock's Grizzly Years and Walking it Off

Abstract

Doug Peacock, known as the inspiration for Edward Abbey's George Hayduke in the environmentalist comedy The Monkey Wrench Gang, has published his own accounts of their relationship and his conservationist work. These memoirs recount his experiences with PTSD after serving in Vietnam and argue for grizzly bear conservation. By using trauma to establish identification with the audience, the texts encourage readers to value other species and their own while resisting the totalizing tendencies of Burkean consubstantiality. The texts build identification and preserve difference through narrative structure and appeals to collective memory that encourage empathy yet stress the specificity of personal experience.

Notes

1 I thank RR peer reviewers Jeremy Engels and Randy Lake for their valuable suggestions and encouragement.

2 On the representation of My Lai in popular cinema and how collective memory of the war has evolved, see Owen.