The (Im)Possibility Of Traumatic Narrative: A Study On The Narrative Strategies In Libra And The Memoirs Of John F. Kennedy

On November 22nd,1963, the 35th President of the United States, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, was assassinated in Dallas, Texas during his visit there to support his reelection campaign for the 1964 presidential election. Fatally shot by an alleged assassin named Lee Harvey Oswald, Kennedy was announced dead shortly after his shift to hospital. This violent assassination has always been a trauma for American people from which they have perhaps never recovered. After the event, the government publicly announced in the 888-page Warren Commission that the assassination was committed by Lee Harvey Oswald alone. The public suspected the result of this report thus naturally not everyone had been convinced by this answer, either had been some great writers and novelists.Ever since the assassination, voluminous literary works have appeared describing the event and at the same time expressing the opinions of the authors. Don DeLillo described the assassination as a conspiracy in Libra. Some former CIA agents wanted to lead the government’s attention to Cuba, thus arranging it to be a spectacular miss. However, things grew out of control and ended up in Kennedy’s being killed in reality. Meanwhile, Donald James Lawn offered another scenario in which the course of American history was altered in his fiction The Memoirs of John F. Kennedy, where Kennedy survived the assassination. He was shot in the back, wounded heavily but finally recovered and was reelected to presidency. To Don DeLillo and Donald James Lawn, the historical truth and the imaginary plot were overlapping in their work to express their traumatic feelings towards this event. But is the traumatic narrative possible in their narration? The thesis attempts to examine the narrative strategies in Libra and The Memoirs of John F. Kennedy which both concern the event, with a focus on exploring the (impossibility of traumatic narrative by providing alternative truths of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Don DeLillo wants to bring the traumatic event back to the public eye by providing a "what if" possibility:what if it is a conspiracy orchestrated by a former CIA officer. While Donald James Lawn even reconstructs the course of American history: John F. Kennedy survived the assassination and won the re-election. He provides another "what if possibility:what if JFK survived and won the reelection in 1964.Traumatic narrative uses words and discourse to express the inner trauma. In Libra and The Memoirs of John F. Kennedy, DeLillo and Lawn both applied the narrative strategy of juxtaposition of chronological narrative with inserted narrative. In Libra, DeLillo narrated chapters interweaved with intercalary chapters while in The Memoirs of John F. Kennedy, Lawn intermingled some historical facts together with lots of imaginary scenes. Besides, the two writers made alternation of historical and fictional perspectives. On the point of view, both novels used an omniscient point of view and the limited omniscient point of view to express the chaotic and mixed feelings. All the narrative techniques applied in the two novels were used to express the traumatic feelings in the two authors’heart. Both DeLillo and Lawn wanted to narrate the traumatic experience in their own way. One based largely on history and the other set on imagination and fiction, both of the novels adopted some narrative techniques to reach the goal of narrating the traumatic experience, reconstructing history and saying no to the official truth. Trauma studies originally focus on physical trauma, and gradually with the development of history, culture and religion, it began to pay its attention on people’s psychological state. Trauma theory has gone through three critical phases in development. Since the 1980s, it has entered a new stage of cross-disciplinary research. In postmodern writing, traumatic narrative can be possible through employing various narrative strategies to express and heal the psychological trauma. The two novels studied here make the traumatic narrative possible by using the strategies mentioned above.In conclusion, by analyzing the narrative strategies of these two novels, the thesis aspires to help readers know the two authors’traumatic expression toward the JFK assassination tragedy. To a certain degree, the adoption of postmodern narrative strategies in novels helps to make the traumatic narrative possible.