Trauma And Healing : Baldwin's Go Tell It On The Mountain

Go Tell It on the Mountain is considered as the most successful novel of James Baldwin.This novel mainly tells the story of a black family,John's Family from the Civil War to 1930 s,which is not only about the trauma suffered by the blacks,but also the epitome of the history for the African Americans.The African-Americans in the then society have suffered much unfair treatment by the whites under the influence of the racial discrimination and racial segregation,which traumatizes the African-Americans deeply and meanwhile they have to suffer the trauma from their family members.This paper mainly analyzes with the trauma theory the tragic fate of John's family in Go Tell It on the Mountain and the ways that they use to get rid of the trauma they suffer,through which readers have an opportunity to understand the novel from a new aspect.The trauma theory mainly contains the symptoms,the causes of the different trauma as well as the ways to recover.In Go Tell It on the Mountain,Baldwin depicts a series of trauma suffered by the black people who have different reflections with the traumatized heart.They are unable to find their proper position in the society and lose their identity after traumatized.They struggle with their trauma and want to get rid of the trauma by reconstructing the past miserable memory and narrating the past to the others to reshape their identity.This paper pays attention to the miserable fate in the society from the perspective of trauma theory.The first part of this thesis is the introduction including the life story and literary creation of the author Baldwin and the novel Go Tell It on the Mountain,and the trauma theory.Then it comes to the main body of the paper.Firstly it describes the alienation among family members after they are traumatized by their family members such as the dysfunctional relationship between father and mother,estrangement between siblings and the mental alienation between husband and wife.Secondly the paper describes the isolation and marginalization of the people who are traumatized by the racial discrimination and the white-dominated society,including Gabriel's hostility to the white,Elizabeth's depression and isolation from the outside world and John's stereotyped self-consciousness and marginalized identity.And the third part of the body shows people's struggle to recover from the trauma,which describes the memory reconstruction and narration of the traumatized black people and then describes the identity recognition and self-recognition.Most people in the novel fails to recover from the trauma,but John succeeds recovering from the trauma.Finally it comes to the conclusion.By exploring the traumatic experience in the novel,this paper is not only to point out the symptoms of the trauma which affect African-Americans and the origins of the trauma,but also to find out the way by which they face the existence dilemma in American society and recover from the trauma suffered then.