Trauma Writing In Cormac McCarthy’s The Border Trilogy

Cormac McCarthy is one of the most influential writers in the contemporaryAmerican literature. His The Border Trilogy is considered as the best works among hiswestern novels. The trilogy describes the experience and exploration of two cowboysand reflects the author’s love for nature and his deep concern about the modernpeople’s spiritual world. This thesis aims to analyze The Border Trilogy through theperspective of trauma writing then to explore the representations and reasons for thetrauma in the novel and provides several pieces of advice on working through thetrauma. So far, the studies on McCarthy and his works have been of great variety,however, there are few studies that adopt the perspective of trauma writing. Therefore,writing this thesis is in the hope of providing a new perspective for the later study.The thesis consists of four parts as the following.The first chapter briefly introduces the basic definition of trauma and itsdevelopment. When trauma goes out of medical field, it acquires cultural significance.Then, trauma fiction as one genre is proposed by critics.The second chapter discusses the representations of trauma in The Border Trilogy.They are mainly referring to the protagonist’s loss of speech right in his family, theisolation from society caused by not accepting the mainstream values, the ambiguousself-recognition and the anxiety about future and the violent murder in prison andblindness of a poor man in the cruel war and the bereavement during an earthquake.The third chapter explores the reasons for the above mentioned trauma. Ingeneral, there are family reason, such as the divorce and sudden death of parents; thesocial reason, such as the destruction of homeland brought by the development ofscientific technology, the cruelty of the war and the evils among humanity; and thepersonal reason for the religious crisis of the protagonists.The fourth chapter probes how the protagonists overcome their traumatic feelingand get rid of their traumatic experience which includes the awakening of self-will,finding new belief to rely on and the trauma narrative. Finally, how the protagonistsbreak away from their solidarity through reconnecting with others and starting thenew life without suffering from the traumatic memory.All in all, this thesis adopts the approach of combining the theory with closereading and explores the trauma writing in McCarthy’s The Border Trilogy. McCarthyexpresses his reflection and deep concern on the psychological change among modernpeople through writing and analyzing trauma.