Traumatized In The Family—A Study Of Jhumpa Lahiri’s Short Stories

Jhumpa Lahiri(1967–)is a distinguished contemporary Indian American short story writer,enjoys a high reputation all over the world for her great contributions to this literary craft.Her debut short story collection,Interpreter of Maladies(1999)made Lahiri the youngest winner of Pulitzer Prize for fiction.The second collection of short stories,entitled Unaccustomed Earth(2008),also won her a number of awards.She has also published two novels,The Namesake(2003)and The Lowland(2013).Each of her literary works contains her deep concern for the living conditions and cultural identity of Indian American people.Based on trauma theory,this thesis attempts to analyze the characters’ experiences of being traumatized in their families in the seventeen stories of Interpreter of Maladies and Unaccustomed Earth,to present the effects of familial trauma upon them and their efforts to recover from those scars.This thesis is divided into five chapters.The first chapter serves as an introduction to Jhumpa Lahiri and her short story collections,the studies of the author and her literary works at home and abroad,and the trauma theory.Chapter Two goes on with the familial trauma caused by triangle relationships in some of Lahiri’s short stories,the situations such as multiple affair,discontent with arranged marriage and illicit child that betray the family principle.Chapter Three reveals the estrangements inside the parental,marital,and sibling subsystems,and specifically including generation gap,coldness,cultural conflict and sibling jealousy.Chapter Four takes examples like the stillborn of a child,the death of mother,and wars that lead family tragedies to discuss the scars in the separated families.Chapter Five concludes that Jhumpa Lahiri delineates and ponders on the theme of familial trauma,meanwhile,she constructs a route for the characters to recover from their familial trauma,that is,to establish a complete and harmonious family.