A Study Of Trauma In No-No Boy

Japanese American literature, as a branch of Asian American literature, has received more and more attention from critics and scholars both in and outside America since the 1960s. Under the pretext of"military necessity", the internment of over 120,000 Japanese Americans by the U.S. government during World War II and its cathartic effect on their lives and identities are projected on most Japanese American writings. No-No Boy is the first novel written by a Japanese American writer to explore the devastating social and psychological consequences of wartime internment and the draft order on the Japanese American minority. However, owing to the sensitive nature of the novel's subject matter, No-No Boy received little attention when first published in 1957. Along with the emergence of Asian American literature, the novel was rediscovered in the 1970s. From then on, its aesthetic and literary values have been widely examined at home and abroad. Now, John Okada is acclaimed as one of the greatest Asian American writers and No-No Boy is publicly recognized as a classic of Asian American literature.Furthermore, the scientific study of trauma started from the end of the 19th century by a group of psychologists such as Sigmund Freud. But trauma theory emerged in the United States in the early 1990s and sought to illuminate the cultural and ethical implications of trauma. Taking John Okada's No-No Boy as an example and combining with trauma theory, this thesis argues that this novel has participated in the construction and representation of Japanese Americans'cultural trauma and great psychological trauma in the postwar period. The term"cultural trauma", proposed by Jeffrey C. Alexander in Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity (2004), indicates the indelible marks of an overwhelming event on the collective consciousness of a group with lasting and damaging effects.In China, less attention has been paid to Japanese American literature, No-No Boy in particular, than the flourishing research on Chinese American literature. Therefore, this thesis tries to combine trauma studies with the literary text in the hope of deepening trauma studies in literature and provides a new angle for the study of Japanese American literature in domestic academic circle.This thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter One includes an overview of Japanese American literature, a literature review of No-No Boy, and a brief introduction of some important terms: cultural trauma, psychological trauma and working-through trauma. Chapter Two dwells on the cultural trauma of the Japanese Americans represented in No-No Boy, including the traumatic memory of the whole group during World War II and its damaging aftermath within the family and community in the postwar years. And Japanese Americans have adopted polarized strategies of American assimilation and Japanese nationalism to cope with such trauma. Chapter Three explores the protagonist Ichiro's psychological trauma evoked by wartime internment and his draft resistance. Ichiro suffers such posttraumatic symptoms as self-contempt, emptiness and the feeling of guilt after being released from the prison. I argue that such symptoms are virtually the results of his inextricable identity crisis. Chapter Four illuminates Ichiro's struggle for working through trauma, by means of understanding people around him and coming to terms with himself. He finally accepts his no-no boy status and begins a new life. In the concluding chapter, this thesis maintains that this novel implicitly challenges the social power that suppressed the construction of Japanese American ethnic group and participates in constructing and representing the trauma of Japanese Americans at both collective and individual levels. In this sense, Okada attempts to call on the American mainstream society to pay close attention to the living predicament of American minorities, and expresses his hopes of avoiding the recurrence of similar events and realizing social solidarity in the future.