The Jewish Unnatural Trauma Narrative In Michael Chabon's Novels

Michael Chabon is one of the contemporary American Jewish writers whose writings focus on Jewish themes.Chabon's novels usually feature with Jews who suffer from traumatic experience and keep struggling in misfortunes.In The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay,Yiddish Plicemen's Union,The Final Solution,Gentlemen on the Road,Chabon depicts Jews of different age,ethnicity,job and background,who all live in the shadow of losing families,which traumatically relates to Jewish history and culture.Chabon adopts the anti-mimetic strategy of unnatural narrative in order to build up the traumatized figures whose micro suffering worlds are interwoven with the macro history of Jewish diaspora existence.This dissertation makes an analysis of Chabon's trauma narrative in three parts,i.e.three chapters respectively on characters,spaces and narrative strategies.Chapter one develops the analysis of Jewish traumatic characters.As in Chabon's novels many characters are mutually mirroring,this chapter will both focus on one main character and also extends to other related characters,in order to check their inter-influence and traumatic refection.Chapter two is given to the analysis of various Jewish spaces.These vivid,unique,weird and symbolic Jewish spaces resonate with the Jewish figures to highlight the Jewishness of Chabon's novels.These spaces not only show the persecution and diaspora history of Jewish people,but also make up the important part of Jewish identity.They are both the designated spaces forced upon the Jews,but also unnatural spaces producing new Jewish culture.Chapter three focuses on Chabon's narrative strategy.This chapter is to analyze some universal narrative characteristics in Chabon's novels,namely genre mixture,alternate history and Americanization of the Holocaust.Unnatural narrative is in nature anti-mimetic,and the unnatural narrative in Chabon's novels refers to his innovation and breakthroughs in the area of genre writing,history novels and the Holocaust novels.Narrative creation in novels is an ever-pursuing goal for writers,as new anti-mimetic ways will be followed,thus become mimetic and then need to be transcended.Therefore,this thesis is to discuss Chabon's unnatural narrative as an open study and aims to discover the artistic characteristics of his trauma narrative.From the perspective of unnatural narrative and trauma writing,this dissertation observes comprehensive dimensions,micro and macro,concrete and abstract,thematic and strategic,individual and collective,memorial and historical,and etc.Therefore,it comes to the conclusion that Michael Chabon has sought a proper channel to express trauma,a possible way to write about Jewish trauma in the four analyzed novele,namely unnatural narrative;besides,as a contemporary American Jewish writer with a large distance from the Holocaust and Jewish diaspora history,he has found a proper position to stand and look back,to un-naturalize and dis-familiarize,to build a successive connection between American Jewish literature,the Holocaust in Europe,and Jewish diaspora in ancient history.