Metafictional representations of trauma

Abstract

This study explores the representation of trauma in three metafictional novels that deal with trauma in the last half century: Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969/2009), Chuck Palahniuk’s Survivor (1999/2000) and Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments (2019). While there is extensive research tracing the various themes in literary depictions of trauma, there is a gap in the studies of metafictional novels that fails to adequately address the connection between metafiction and representation of trauma in literary texts. Therefore, this study fills this gap in the existing scholarship with its focus on the metafictional representations of trauma. Building on the existing interdisciplinary approaches to trauma studies and metafiction, this M.A. thesis demonstrates how metafiction is an apt narrative strategy to convey the inherent resistance in traumatic experience to representation through the discourses of totalizing meta-narratives. By exposing how trauma manifests itself on the psyche of the victim, Slaughterhouse-Five, Survivor and The Testaments reveal that its representation also requires unconventional means of narration. All three novels not only self-reflexively question the limits of narrativity in representing trauma but also attempt at alternative narratives that are self-aware of the difficulty inherent in the task of representing trauma and actively include the reader in the creation of the testimonial text.