“They’re letters to my son.”: A Genettian Study of Narrated Trauma in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Selected Epistolary Novels[Latin Thesis]

Zeinab Kohan Isazadeh

Trauma has come into consideration in recent ages since human’s life is full of devastating events. As they are dreadful experiences, they can cause problem in verbal communication. Jonathan Safran Foer, a contemporary American novelist, addresses the issue in his two novels Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (EL & IC) and Everything Is Illuminated (Everything). As a novelist, he depicts the problematic communication of modern and postmodern human perfectly through his narrative. He creates characters who are in search of healing, thus they test writing about their traumas. They choose epistolary form of narrative because they find it hard to talk about them. To analyze these two novels in this research the traumatized characters will be discussed psychoanalytically on the ground of structuralism to see how they are depicted. Thus, they will be scrutinized in the realm of Narratology with the concepts of “narrative voice” and “narrative time” the two significant notions presented by Gerard Genette, a French literary theorist who is mostly associated with structuralists. Yet examining them with the lens of psychoanalysis and narratology seems insufficient due to the fact that these novels are both postmodernists. Therefore, their postmodernist techniques will be scrutinized based on Foer’s narrative style, too. As these characters are struggling to relieve themselves of trauma, that they inherited from a genocide directly or indirectly, they test various ways to reach their goal and the last solution is to write about it. This research argues that Foer depicts his traumatized characters through narrative time and narrative voice and then leads them to the healing. He does it either by changing in the narrative voice or embracing it bravely. Key Words: Gerard Genette, Jonathan Safran Foer, Narrative, Narratology, Trauma, Postmodernist techniques