Why Is It So Difficult to Tell the Story of War?

Peppino Ortoleva explores the historical and narrative challenges of representing war, from Stendhal's Waterloo to modern drone conflicts. The article traces the evolution of war narration from Homer's Iliad through the chivalric poems, Cervantes, and Tasso, highlighting Stendhal's pivotal shift to subjective perspective in The Charterhouse of Parma (1839). Ortoleva notes that modern media, especially television during the Vietnam War, created plausible yet incomplete images, while cinema like Ridley Scott's Black Hawk Down (2001) and Brian De Palma's Redacted (2007) reveal the fragmentation of vision. World War I narratives by Remarque, Barbusse, Jünger, Ungaretti, and Owen emphasized subjective experience, while Hašek's The Good Soldier Švejk and Chaplin's Shoulder Arms used humor to expose paradoxes. The article concludes that contemporary conflicts, with indistinguishable combatants in camouflage and remote drone warfare, have become puzzles where no one holds all the pieces.