Speaking the Unspeakable: Studying Trauma in Post 9/11 Novels

Abstract

This thesis is based in the context of trauma of 9/11 attacks as represented in Ian McEwan’s Saturday and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extermely Loud & Incredibly Close. The representation of the trauma of 9/11 took various forms in fictional discourse. Some novelists sentimentalize and politicize the events. However, a novelist like Foer, depicts the victims suffering as closely as possible. Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close analyzes the suffering of trauma and their ways of coping with trauma. The characters in this novel pass through various stages of trauma like melancholia and mourning. In their traumatic narration, novelists remain true to characters trauma portraying it closely. Similarly, McEwan, in Saturday, shows how an individual cannot easily get out of the media narratives about the 9/11 in the media-saturated world. The main character, Perowne, first makes his mind out of media narratives but towards the end he comes to realize from the incidents with Baxter that the response to 9/11 is not violence as advocated by media. Thus, this novel shows the resistance to the media’s construction and interpretation of events that is a battle cry for revenge through war.