The Trauma Study Of Libra

As one of the most prominent postmodern novelists in contemporary America，Don Delillo’s ninth novel Libra had been given attention by so many critics once itcame out and it earned the Aer Lingus/Irish Times International Fiction Prize for him.The thesis combines the trauma theory with narrative theory and has a closereading of Libra. Based on the event of the assassination of JFK and take the traumatheory as the theoretical frame, the thesis mainly deals with first, the traumatizer ofthe traumatic event, Oswald’s individual trauma, that is, the reason why he took partin the assassination; second, the collective trauma that the traumatic event results tothe America. By means of writing the novel Libra, Delillo attempts to help theAmericans work through the trauma. It is hoped that the present study could arrive anew interpretation of Libra.This dissertation contains five parts:The first chapter introduces the author Don Delillo and his major achievementsand the literature review on Libra. The second chapter gives an overview of traumatheory and the integration of trauma and fiction. The third chapter analyses thetraumatizer---Oswald’s individual trauma. It contains two parts. The first is Oswald’straumatic experience and the reasons why he is traumatized. As a matter of fact,Oswald has gone through trauma all the time. It is his traumatic experience that resultsin his frenzy action to kill the President. There are a lot of reasons which result inOswald’s traumatic experience such as the abnormal upbring, the influence of theleftism and some other social reasons. The second is that with the use of narrativetechnique repetition, Oswald’s trauma is presented more vividly. The fourth chapterdeals with the collective trauma caused by the Kennedy assassination. It analyses theAmerican nation’s traumatic experience of and reaction to the traumatic event. Withthe narrative technique of metafiction, the author tries to make people work throughthe trauma, that is, to look at the traumatic event from a new angle and form a coherent cognition of the reality. The last part is the conclusion. Due to the abnormalupbringing and the social affects being a victim of the politics, Oswald becomes atraumatizer from a person who is traumatized. Because of the suddenness of theassassination and the incomprehensibility of it, the nation are traumatized. Throughthe analysis of the traumatic reaction when the assassination happened plus therepresentatives of the nation, Nicholas Branch’s and the author Don Delillo’s inabilityto understand the traumatic event after so long time, the collective trauma is welldelineated. Through the strategy of metafiction, the author Delillo hopes to provide anexample for the traumatized nation to see the traumatic event from another way andhave their own interpretation whatever it is as long as they form a coherentconsciousness of the reality.