Trauma And Recovery: The Text Connotation Research On The Round Home From The Perspective Of Trauma Theory

As one of the representatives of the second generation of American Indian writers, Louise Erdrich’s works are well-accepted by the general public. The Round House successfully won the National Book Awards in 2012 for its special narrative strategies and acute observation. The novel inheriting the previous concern on the Indian Reservation’s living condition exposes the judicial injustice for the American Indians. Instead of providing any protection for the local people, the law on the reservation, as a matter of fact, brings much hurt to them. This paper explores the hurt on the body and the mind of American Indians, as well as admires their belief, strength, and resilience under the great pressure with the aid of trauma and recovery theory.The thesis mainly consists of six chapters. Chapter One briefly introduces Louise Erdrich and her recent novel The Round House; Chapter Two reviews the recent studies at home and abroad on the author and her works. Besides, this chapter also presents the outlines of trauma and recovery theory; Chapter Three analyzes the unbearable physical and psychological hurt in terms of individual, family and collective traumatic perspective, and contends that the hurt is caused by the loophole and injustice of the local law; Chapter Four manifests the magic therapeutic power of traditional culture, the love from family members, as well as the solidarity among the clans. They all play an important role in keeping their life ceaselessly recycling and facing the life with a stubborn perseverance; Chapter Five turns to probe into its particular narrative strategies and their extraordinary effect on the construction of the novel. The paper makes it clear that the children’s perspective and the multiple narration indicate an state of cultural aphasia which raises the collective trauma into a higher level; Chapter Six sums up the whole thesis and sketches the contours of the hardships from the trauma to the recovery. That is exactly the meaning and the value of the research on the minority literature. However, since The Round House was just published for the readers and the limitation of the paper’s author, there are also some shortages in this research.