A Solitary Spiritual Catcher-a Study Of Trauma Narrative In Terrorist

John Updike (1932-2009) is widely considered to be a prolific writer whoseworks are considered as detailed portraits of American social reality and Americanlives. The twenty-second novel of John Updike, Terrorist was published in2006.Once published, it attracted much attention in the critics. It concerns from the point ofview of a terrorist, which mainly deals with a story about an American born,18-year-old Ahmad Mulloy what urges him to give up the campus life but be misledby the terrorists and intended to bomb Lincoln tunnel.Most of the overseas and domestic critics and scholars read the novel from theperspective of the themes of9/11, the writing techniques in presenting the suspenseending, and so on. In the10thanniversary of the9/11attack, there is a tendency tostrengthen the research of trauma theory in the domestic and foreign academic field,but no one ever analyzed this novel from the perspective of the traumatic theory.Based on this theory, this thesis tries to analyze Terrorist in details. It mainly dealswith the individual trauma of the traumatizer and the collective trauma the traumaticevents brought to the American. In order to explore how the novel represents thecharacters’ trauma by way of the narrative techniques, it also combines the traumatheory with the narrative theory.The complete thesis consists of six parts:In the Introduction, it introduces the author John Updike and his works, theliterature review on Terrorist, and then presents the reasons, purposes, significancesand the methods to analyze Terrorist. Chapter One gives a brief summary of thedevelopment of trauma theory including the previous conceptions and contemporaryconceptions, the relation between the trauma and the fiction and trauma narrative.Chapter Two demonstrates the social, religious and moral conflicts that cause thetrauma of characters embodied in the novel. Chapter Three offers a detailed analysisof Terrorist as a trauma fiction and concentrates on personal trauma of the protagonistwithin the frame narrative, as well as the collective trauma of the other charactersthrough the embedded narrative. Chapter Four interprets the novel from theperspective of narrative techniques. The effects of omniscient narrator and variable focalization is to highlight the traumatic themes after9/11attack. In Conclusion, itsummarizes the overall statement of the thesis, clarifying that Terrorist has a narrativeof post-9/11trauma, and deep worries and concerns it delivers.