Study Of Traumatic Writing In John Banville’s Novels

John Banville(1945-)is one of the most famous writers in contemporary Ireland.His novel and unconventional creative techniques and rich imagination make his works stand out.Banville’s novels usually have heavy themes.He is good at expressing the tragedy of life by writing about the protagonist’s painful traumatic experience.The traumatic protagonists in the novel are always in contradiction and struggle with themselves,and are constantly struggling to escape from trauma and seek redemption.Meanwhile,Banville prefers to use the first-person narrative to trace back the hero’s traumatic experience and restore their true traumatic experience,thus arouses the reader’s strong resonance and deep sympathy.This paper uses trauma theory to study Banville’s works,showing the unique theme of trauma in his works.Through the analysis of trauma phenomena,we can grasp the relationship between individual circumstances and times’ trauma,and explore the salvation outlet between trauma healing and imagination.In this thesis,the author dives into Banville’s rich and broad text world,to explore the potential of the unknown secrets.This thesis is intended to explore Banville’s novel,including The Book of Evidence,Ghosts,Athena,The Sea and Birchwood to explore the expression of traumatic themes in Banville’s novels.This thesis is divided into four parts.The introduction introduces Banville and his main representative works,the research status of Banville at home and abroad,the development process of trauma theory and the innovation of this thesis.The first chapter discusses the traumatic memory in Banville’s novels.In Banville’s novels,traumatic memory is not only about individuals,but also about history of Irish.The novel shows the impact of violent and bloody Irish historical memory on Irish society at present,and reflect Irish social reality problems from the fragile marriage,tense parent-child relationship,abnormal social class,moral deficiency and fragility of life.The social atmosphere is still tense due to the aftermath of historical trauma.Historical trauma memory and personal trauma memory act on the protagonist at the same time,which undoubtedly aggravates their trauma.Traumatic memory has its unique way of expression and mechanism of operation in his novels.Banville uses fragmented space-time structure to highlight the impact of traumatic memory on the victims,and creates typical scene images to create the psychological state of fear,loneliness,alienation and violence when the victims face traumatic memory.The second chapter discusses the symptoms of trauma.The protagonists in Banville’s trauma novels all suffer from PTSD after experiencing trauma.The novel presents the painful state in which the victim tries hard to forget the traumatic memory but cannot forget.Among them,the most obvious and typical symptom is self-split,which destroys the integrity of individual existence and makes the protagonist lost in the abyss of self in the chaotic state.this chapter explores the different manifestations of the three traumatic protagonists’ split and the deep reasons of their split.Chapter three explores the healing of trauma and the redemption of trauma.This chapter,centering on the three novels with continuous story lines of The Book of Evidence,Ghost and Athena,combs the psychological process of the victims’ escape,healing and redemption by using the method of close reading,and explores the possibility of imaginative redemption in Banville’s novels.Imagination is not only the unique writing style of Banville’s novels,but also directly participates in the construction of the contents of these three novels and becomes the outlet of the hero’s redemption.In his works,Banville frees the trauma of history from the fixed point of time by showing the trauma of small people,makes people face history and remember history,he also deeply explores the heavy themes of humanity,morality and life,which makes his works have profound aesthetic value and cultural significance.