Trauma And Peace

Michael Ondaatje (1943-) is one of the representative immigrant writers in contemporary Canadian literature. Infused with his double roles as immigrant and writer, his semi-autobiography Divisadero has attracted wide concern and attention in society since its first publication. It won the Governor General’s Award, the most prestigious award for Canadian literature and became one of the representative works of immigrant literature.Under the guidance of Henri Lefebvre’s spatial theory, this thesis interprets Divisadero from the perspectives of physical space, psychological space, and social space. Besides, this thesis focuses on immigrants represented by Anna, Coop and Lucien and analyzes immigrants’psychological journey of getting over their trauma, understanding and confronting their own history through reconciliation with traumatic past. The chapter of physical space divides space into three levels, rural space, urban space, and war space. It progressively presents the transformation of immigrants’ living environment and condition. The chapter of psychological space divides into traumatic psychology and trauma treatment, and analyzes traumatic influence on immigrants’psychology caused by rootlessness, violence and war. The chapter of social space divides into building an equal space and constructing a harmonious space. It analyzes a various of problems and hard living space that immigrants have encountered, reveals hegemony as one of the important causes for turbulence of an individual and a nation, and highlights that constructing a harmonious society is an effective way to solve problem of immigration.The innovation of this thesis lies in probing into the living environment and condition, psychological state, survival predicament and solution of immigration from a multi-spaces of physical, psychological and social dimensions. Ondaatje reviews a specific history of immigrants in Divisadero and indicates great contributions of immigrants to the social development. Furthermore, Ondaatje’s "life-centered" harmony conception has profound enlightenment and reference function in dealing with the difficult issues in the contemporary era, such as immigration, refugee, war, terrorism, starvation, imparity and environmental pollution as well.