The Representation of Trauma and the Journey to Closure in Post-9/11 Novels

Novels Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer, Falling Man by Don DeLillo and The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid all engage with the individual and collective traumas of 9/11. They do so in different ways and from different perspectives, but each struggles with the desire for (or impossibility of) achieving narrative closure. My thesis will use Mieke Bal’s theory linking trauma to the impossibility of closure in order to analyze the novels’ strategies to address the trauma of 9/11. I will argue that the level of healing achieved is directly related to the degree of narrative closure each novel reaches. Oskar, the child protagonist of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (year), addresses the trauma of losing his father in the attacks by going on a quest and keeping a scrapbook in which he collects his memories of his father’s life and death. This process allows him (and the novel) to achieve closure. Falling Man (year) collects the fragments of the...Show moreNovels Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer, Falling Man by Don DeLillo and The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid all engage with the individual and collective traumas of 9/11. They do so in different ways and from different perspectives, but each struggles with the desire for (or impossibility of) achieving narrative closure. My thesis will use Mieke Bal’s theory linking trauma to the impossibility of closure in order to analyze the novels’ strategies to address the trauma of 9/11. I will argue that the level of healing achieved is directly related to the degree of narrative closure each novel reaches. Oskar, the child protagonist of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (year), addresses the trauma of losing his father in the attacks by going on a quest and keeping a scrapbook in which he collects his memories of his father’s life and death. This process allows him (and the novel) to achieve closure. Falling Man (year) collects the fragments of the lives of direct and indirect New York victims of the attacks, and tries to reassemble them. Here, the trauma is addressed on a more collective level than in the case of ELaIC, sometimes successfully, in other cases less so. The Reluctant Fundamentalist (year) is a novel from the other side: its speaker and main character is a Pakistani activist, whose trauma consists of his rejection by American society after 9/11. Changez and the other characters function as metaphors for the national traumas incurred. These remain unresolved and the novel accordingly does not reach narrative closure. Together, these novels suggest that individual 9/11 traumas may be worked through successfully, but that there remains an unresolved collective or even global trauma.Show less

Leiden University Student Repository

Documents

In Collections

The Representation of Trauma and the Journey to Closure in Post-9/11 Novels