Voicing the Wounds: A Study of War Trauma in the Short Narrative of AndrewSlater's "New Me"

Abstract

Trauma, as a concept, indicates the return of the repressed. The phantom of the past is repressed
in the crypt of the unconscious when it is intentionally silenced by the traumatized individual.
Literature; however, functions as a declarative memory that is responsible for bearing witness to
traumatic experiences and voicing them instead of being exposed to neglect, distortion,
fabrication, and misrepresentation. In this sense, the individual traumatized "I" indicates a
collective "we" that stands for a whole group or community who share a collective traumatized
consciousness. Literature that is written by American veterans, who participated in Iraq War of
2003, functions as a prism through which the collective traumatic experience of war is examined
and highlighted.
Examining Andrew Slater's "New Me", the study argues that the author follows modern
and postmodern modes of representing the collective traumatized consciousness of American
veterans and thus transfers individual experiences from its individual sphere into a lager scope
of collectivity.
The study relies on the psychological and literary approaches of trauma. As such the
study significantly draws on Cathy Caruth's Unclaimed Experiences, Michelle Balaev's The
Nature of Trauma in American Novels, Dominick LaCapra's Writing History, Writing Trauma
and other theorists in the field of trauma theory.