"To give form to what cannot be comprehended": Trauma in Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five and Martin Amis's Time's Arrow
The primary objective of this article is the analysis of trauma in Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five and Martin Amis's Time's Arrow. It is argued that through the deployment of experimental literary techniques (particularly destabilized and non-linear narratives) these two novels offer valuable insights into the mechanisms of a traumatized mind and help to understand the uncertain sense of the self experienced by those who suffer from traumatic memories. ; aleksandra.czajk@gmail.com ; Aleksandra Czajkowska is an English Philology graduate from the University of Białystok, Poland. In 2021, she defended her MA thesis in the field of Literary Studies. Her primary literary interests include literature concerned with the Second World War and psychological fiction. ; The University of Białystok, Poland ; Amis, M. 1992. Time's Arrow, or The Nature of the Offense. New York: Vintage Books. ; Bellamy, J. D. & Casey, J. 1988. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. in: William Rodney Allen (ed.), Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut, 156-167. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. ; Breuer, J. & Freud S. 1957. Studies on Hysteria. ed and trans. James Strachey. New York: Basic Books Inc. ; Cacicedo, A. 2005. "You must remember this": Trauma and Memory in Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse-Five. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 46:4: 357-368. ; Caruth, C. 1995. Introduction. In: Cathy Caruth (ed.), Trauma: Explorations in Memory, 3-12, 151-157. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press. ; Caruth, C. 1996. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History. Baltimore, MD: The John Hopkins University Press. ; Crosthwaite, P. 2009. Trauma, Postmodernism, and the Aftermath of World War II. London: Palgrave Macmillan. ; Freud, S. 1961. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. ed and trans. James Strachey. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. ; Gibbs, A. 2014. Contemporary American Trauma Narratives. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. ; Harris, G. 1999. Men giving birth to new world orders: Martin Amis's Time's Arrow. Studies in the Novel 31:4: 489-505. ; Kaplan, E. A. 2005. Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. ; Lifton, R. J. 1986. The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide. New York: Basic Books. ; Lothe J. et al. 2012. Introduction: "After" Testimony: Holocaust Representation and Narrative Theory. In: Jakob Lothe et al. (eds.), After Testimony: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Holocaust Narrative for the Future, 1-22. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press. ; Martinez-Alfaro, M. J. 2008. Fact and Fable: Ethics and the Defamiliarisation of the Familiar in Martin Amis' Time's Arrow. Proceedings from the 31st AEDEAN Conference, 497-507. ; McGlothlin, E. 2010. Theorizing the Perpetrator in Bernhard Schlink's The Reader and Martin Amis's Time's Arrow. In: R. C. Spargo & R. M. Ehrenreich (eds.), After Representation?: The Holocaust, Literature, and Culture, 210-230. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. ; Mohamed, S. 2015. Of monsters and men: Perpetrator trauma and mass atrocity. Columbia Law Review 115:5: 1157-1216. ; Rosenfeld, N. 2004. Turning Back: Retracing Twentieth-Century Trauma in Virginia Woolf, Martin Amis, and W. G. Sebald. Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and History of Ideas 2:2: 109-137. ; Spargo, R. C. 2010. Introduction: On the Cultural Continuities of Literary Representation. In: R. C. Spargo & R. M. Ehrenreich (eds.), After Representation?: The Holocaust, Literature, and Culture, 1-22. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. ; Standish, D. 1988. Playboy Interview. In: William Rodney Allen (ed.), Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut, 76-110. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. ; Stonebridge, L. 2009. Theories of Trauma. In: M. MacKay (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of World War II, 194-206. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ; Suvin, D. 1972. On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre. College English 43:3: 372-382. ; Van der Kolk, B. A. & van der Hart, O. 1995. The Intrusive Past: The Flexibility of Memory and the Engraving of Trauma. In: C. Caruth (ed), Trauma: Explorations in Memory, 158-182. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press. ; Vees-Gulani, S. 2003. Diagnosing Billy Pilgrim: A Psychiatric Approach to Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five. Critique 44:2: 175-184. ; Vonnegut, K. 2005. A Man without a Country. ed. Daniel Simon. New York: Seven Stories Press. ; Vonnegut, K. 2009. Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death. New York: Dial Press Trade Paperback. ; Wicks, A. 2014. "All This Happened, More or Less": The Science Fiction of Trauma in Slaughterhouse-Five. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 55:3: 329-340. ; 34 (3/2021) ; 59 ; 72