Silent Wounds: Trauma, Repression, and Memory in Contemporary Fiction
Author : Ayyub Abbas Shaikh and Dr. Shaikh Parvez Aslam
Abstract :
This paper investigates the intricate relationship between trauma, repression, and memory as they manifest across a selection of contemporary literary fiction, arguing that the formal structures of these narratives are not merely stylistic choices but psychoanalytically charged responses to historical and personal violence. Drawing on the theoretical frameworks of Cathy Caruth's model of traumatic belatedness, Dominick LaCapra's concept of working-through, Sigmund Freud's foundational theories of repression, Marianne Hirsch's notion of postmemory, and Judith Herman's clinical constructions of trauma survivorship, the study reads Toni Morrison's Beloved, Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun as sites where silence functions as testimony, fragmented chronology mirrors psychological dissociation, and narrative gaps encode what language cannot fully articulate. Employing a qualitative methodology that combines interpretive literary analysis, psychoanalytic criticism, and comparative textual reading, this study identifies five interlocking patterns across these texts: narrative fragmentation as mnemonic rupture, the spectral return of repressed memory, gendered configurations of suffering, collective and historical violence, and the redemptive possibilities of mnemonic reconstruction. The research contributes to contemporary trauma studies by demonstrating that literary fiction does not simply represent psychological wounds but actively performs them, demanding from readers an ethical engagement with forms of suffering that conventional discourse suppresses or forecloses.
Keywords :
Trauma theory, literary memory, repression, narrative fragmentation, postmemory.
