Trauma And Traumatic Narrative In Enduring Love

Ian McEwan is an excellent writer who has been active in British literary world during 1970 s. He is also famous for his great productivity and rich creative techniques and has won many significant literature awards at home and abroad. His sixth work Enduring Love is very popular with critics in the West, while little attention has been paid to this novel in China. Western scholars have studied this work through the theory of psychology, narratology and postmodernism for a long time, but neglect the traumatic theme.The thesis intends to explore trauma and traumatic narrative in the novel from the perspective of trauma theory. From the level of narrative techniques, unique narrative perspectives, nonlinear narrative structure, and intertextuality all involve in trauma reflection of characters’ psychology. From the level of narrative content, the thesis analyzes a series of traumatic syndromes: Joe’s identity loss, Jed’s obsession and Joe’s deteriorated relationship with Clarissa and explores two reasons behind above traumatic syndromes. One is collective trauma: the crisis of faith and stubbornness of cultural disease. The other one is individual trauma:alienation and loneliness of individuals and the loss of safety of family. Although the protagonists attempt to cure trauma through establishing safety, remembrance and mourning, and reconstructing new interpersonal relationships, their struggling doomed to be a failure in the western civilization. Based on the theory of trauma theory from Cathy Caruth and Judith Herman, this thesis aims to highlight trauma theme in McEwan’s novel. It not only expresses social problems and situations beneath the western civilization, but also manages to awake people’s concern on the traumatized group as well as helps to solve this issue on social level.