Trauma And Ethics In Margaret Atwood's Blind Assassin

Margaret Atwood(1939--),a Canadian poet,novelist and literary critic,has won many awards at home and abroad,such as the Canadian governor's literature award,Kafka's literature award,Booker's award,etc.,She is known as the "Queen of Canadian Literature".Atwood was nominated for the UK Booker prize four times and won the title in 2000 for his novel Blind Assassin,Until now,the research on Blind Assassin mainly focuses on narratology,feminist criticism and postmodern ism.In recent years,there has been a new trend of trauma research,but it is still in its infancy and needs to be further explored.The structure of Blind Assassin is exquisite.It adopts a three-layer nested narrative structure,which is composed of three parts:recollective narrative,science fiction text and news clipping.The main part of the novel is the protagonist Alice's recollective narrative,which takes the individual traumatic memory as the clue to show the trauma caused by the disorder of three ethical relations:mother and daughter,husband and wife,hand and foot.The novel shows a personal growth history full of ethical confusion and trauma.With the development of trauma writing,Alice can repair the trauma through ethical reflection and identity construction.In this novel,based on personal trauma,Atwood unfolds the imagination of family ethics,which has rich ethical connotation and value.This paper takes Alice's individual trauma as the research object,comprehensively uses three critical methods,trauma theory,Literary Ethics Criticism and narratology theory,analyzes Alice's trauma memory and replay mode from the ethical perspective,probes into the narrative strategy of trauma avoidance and reappearance in Alice's trauma writing,explores the relationship between the hero's trauma repair and ethical construction,so as to dig out the article The ethical connotation and value orientation of the book reveal the author's ethical orientation and humanistic feelings.This paper is divided into five chapters:introduction,body three chapters,conclusion.The introduction part mainly introduces the reasons for the topic selection,the research status at home and abroad,expounds the research methods and significance of this paper,and briefly explains the main theoretical terms used in this paper.The first chapter takes Alice's trauma memory and the way of trauma replay as the research object.Based on the dual identities of Alice's victims and perpetrators,this paper analyzes the intergenerational trauma,marriage trauma and death trauma suffered by Alice from the disorder of three ethical relationships:mother and daughter,husband and wife,hand and foot.Pay attention to Alice's identity transformation from the victim to the perpetrator,and explore the traumatic stress caused by the perpetrator.The delay of traumatic events makes the traumatic memory hover and linger in Alice's life for a long time,and repeat the traumatic events in a certain form,resulting in traumatic symptoms.Through the analysis of ghost images and scenes in nightmares,this paper summarizes the ways of Alice's trauma replay,and explores the mental symptoms caused by trauma replay.The second chapter takes Alice's trauma narrative as the research object.From the perspective of narrative strategy,we can analyzes the avoidance phenomenon in trauma narrative,and the trauma representations in narrative.The huge blow brought by trauma will make the victims produce psychological defense mechanism,which will cause the paradox of trauma narrative.By analyzing the strategies of projection,ellipsis and displacement of space in trauma narrative,this paper explores Alice's contradictory attitude towards trauma memory.Meanwhile,we will analyzes the trauma representation by four aspects:Defense testimony,forced repetition,fragmented narrative and inter-textual narrative.The third chapter takes Alice's trauma recovery as the research object.Trauma writing is an important way for Alice to go to trauma repair.Through the analysis of Alice's intention changes in the process of writing,combing the changes of her mental symptoms,to explore the text representation of trauma repair.The essence of trauma writing is ethical reflection and identity construction.By analyzing the consideration factors of Alice's different ethical choices,this paper reveals the important role of ethical factors in trauma repair.Identity is an important mark of a person.Through analyzing the blind area of Alice's identity cognition and the way of identity reconstruction,we can excavate the family ethical imagination contained in the novel.In the conclusion part,except to summarize the previous text,it also combined with other Atwood novels and literary theory collection,in order to analyzes the change of the theme of trauma in Atwood's novels.Finally,this part will points out the uniqueness and practical significance of the blind assassin.