Trauma And American Collective Memory In DeLillo's Libra

This thesis aims to probe into the trauma and American collective memory in Don DeLillo's Libra from a psychological perspective.Libra has been widely studied on its characterization,theme,artistic characteristics,narrating pattern,postmodernist features and so forth,but a psychological reading is far from enough.The thesis is primarily based on the theory of traumatic memory which is thriving these years and the theory of collective memory put forward by Maurice Halbwachs.The theory of traumatic memory focuses on the individual trauma and its durative influence on the sufferer.However,collective memory is a social-constructive concept which refers to the public's understandings and reconstructions to the collective past based on present situations.The two kinds of memory theories and the conjunction between them provide us with a new perspective to further understand and research modern literatures.The trauma and American collective memory in Libra center on the assassination of President Kennedy,which is the main plot of the novel and also one of the most important events in contemporary American history.There are three narrative lines in Libra: the life of gunman Lee Harvey Oswald,the conspiracy of the assassination plotted by a CIA veteran Walter Everett,and the secret history of the assassination written by the retired CIA analyst Nicholas Branch.DeLillo describes the traumatic memory of the main characters in Libra for arousing the public's collective memory of JFK's assassination.Hence,according to trauma theory,the thesis first of all explores Lee Oswald's and Walter Everett's traumatic sources and symptoms.Oswald has experienced dangling with family,being marginalized in society and being involved in the conspiracy of the assassination,and has suffered from the traumatic symptoms such as apathy,isolation,paranoia and dissociation.While Everett experienced the failure of the Bay of Pigs Invasion and his semiretirement,and has suffered from traumatic symptoms such as paranoia,amnesia and Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.Their radical reactions to traumas directly cause the assassination of President Kennedy.Then,through the descriptions to the scene of JFK's assassination,the traumatic acting-out of the public at that time,and the difficulty of writing secret history by Nicholas Branch,Libra represents a special kind of collective memory and historical trauma the American public hold in the assassination of President Kennedy.Moreover,the assassination of President Kennedy is a traumatic event that Americans might never recover from,partly because they doubt the validity of the official truth in Warren Report.Libra further refutes the official truth and reveals an alternative history.With the description to individual traumatic memory and representation of American collective memory,DeLillo deconstructs the collective memory constructed by Warren Report,and intends to reconstruct American collective memory of the assassination,finally,heals the historical traumas of the assassination of President Kennedy.