چکیده

This paper studies trauma in Cormac McCarty’s The Road in the context of post-apocalyptic world. The selected novel focuses on the dominant traumatic instances that have influenced the character’s lives. In The Road, the father and his son are not alone in the early stages of the narrative as they are initially accompanied by an unnamed woman, who is the man’s wife and the boy’s mother, but who leaves them when her son is still very young and is now presumed dead. The man’s flashbacks indicate that her desertion was motivated by depression at the bleak, post-apocalyptic world in which they lived. Her absence is quite a traumatic issue, especially for the man, and leaves the father and son to walk continuously in the bleak roads of nothingness and reinforces the impression of a dreary, meaningless world through which the two are travelling. Besides the man’s dream of his wife, there are also flashbacks of life before the apocalypse, in which he continuously vacillates between dreams and reality. The downward course of events continues especially for the father since the spiritual and material values of the past life with its memories are obviously no longer attainable for him since the beginning of the post-apocalyptic era. The past is revived only in the flashbacks and memories associated with some places and in objects that the father encounters during their long walk to the south. The main objective of this paper is to present the extents that trauma has occupied the fictional lives, with reference to the studies of psychological trauma by Cathy Caruth. Caruth clearly claims that the individual cannot perceive the traumatic event as it comes so suddenly and leaves the victim with extremely blurred memories. In addition to the burden of an unclear range of happenings in the past, there is also the problematic case of the now and the days to come. Because trauma expands in one’s life with the experience of the past, it has its effects in the present and continues in the future with its repeating traces. That is, trauma comes to dominate one’s life as experience of the past is prolonged in the affected mind, darkly coloring the present through obsessive recurrence and thus hijacking the future.

کليدواژه ها

Cathy Caruth, The Road, Trauma, post- apocalyptic

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faranak kakanaeini , 1398 , Post- Apocalyptic and Traumatic Disorder in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road , اولين کنفرانس بين المللي مطالعات زبان انگليسي