Narrating War Trauma: Memory, Violence, and Fragmentation in Frankenstein in Baghdad and The Things They Carried
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.31185/wjfh.Vol22.Iss2.1672Keywords:
ethical fragmentation, war trauma narratives, Frankenstein in Baghdad, The Things They Carried, postcolonial trauma studies, communal mnemonic archiveAbstract
The article provides a comparison of Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi and The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, claiming that both works use the concept of ethical fragmentation, a conscious breaking of the narrative unity as a moral reaction to mass violence. It has three claims based on trauma theory by Cathy Caruth, Dominick LaCapra, and Marianne Hirsch, and postcolonial critique by Stef Craps: OBrien uses metafiction and Saadawi polyphony are different but ethically similar; their difference is combatant-civilian asymmetry; and dialogic reading shows the limitations of Western models of individual trauma and emphasizes collective witnessing. The paper suggests a Memory-Violence-Representation nexus and the idea of a communal mnemonic archive, which places the novel by Saadawi at the center of the world trauma literature and contributes to developing the instruments of analyzing postcolonial trauma.
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