The Trauma Narrativein Let The Great World Spin

Let the Great World Spin(2009) is written by Colum McCann who is both Irish and American. This thesis firstly scrutinizes the trauma themes of this novel from both American and Irish experience and categorizes them into “collective psychological traumas” and “individual psychological traumas” according to the domestic and international research on this novel that most researches focus on its narrative and a few concentrate on its trauma. Secondly, this paper explores the features of trauma narrative by analyzing the way how McCann highlights the trauma theme in Let the Great World Spin from its three outstanding features. For its structure, McCann by using nonlinear narrative successfully breaks the boundary of time and space and builds a New York City full of messes in his novel. For its language, there are a lot of verbal repetitions, even repetition of a certain plot. For its characters, McCann deliberately portrays eleven normal characters by our judging from their jobs and identities. Among them, Corrigan may be considered by some researchers that he is one protagonist, but actually, he dies in the very early pages of this novel and seldom has chances to tell his own stories; Solomon Soderberg may be the one as well, but he is an incompetent judge and traumatized by the city and the death of his son. All these help McCann enhance the trauma theme in this novel. At last, three models of trauma narrative, group talk, one-on-one talk and self-talk, constructed by McCann are concluded in this thesis. It is hoped that the research field of Let the Great World Spin will be broadened at last by combining literary research with trauma, narrative and history.In the thesis? body comprised are three components. Chapter one Trauma Themes in Let the Great World Spin emphasizes its trauma themes by combing them into collective and individual psychological traumas. From the features of this novel?s structure, language and characters, Chapter two examines its trauma narrative features by exploring the way how McCann expresses trauma theme literally. Chapter three is about characters? redemption through trauma narrative in Let the Great World Spin, and how McCann constructs the three trauma narrative models for the traumatized characters to get their redemption, mainly Claire?s and Corrigan?s trauma narration and Tillie?s trauma writing.