On Trauma Writing In Hosseini’s Novels

Khaled Hosseini, an Afghan American writer, always insists on writing the story about the Afghans suffering trauma in his three novels. His novel focus on writing trauma, from The Kite Runner, the author writing his own traumatic memories, to A Thousand Splendid Suns, the depiction of trauma about Afghan women’s lives, and then to the And The Mountains Echoed, a brother and sister’s separation and reunion in sixty years. All the characters in his three novels, suffer from the traumas caused by personal feelings, social environment, traditional culture and other reasons. The author’s writing displays the protagonists’ sufferings and their respective pilgrimage to redemption and salvation, and explores the possibility of curing the psychological trauma, as well as the influence of trauma in the process of personal growth.Under the narrative method and trauma theory, from the point of sufferings, this thesis attempts to unscramble the protagonists’ traumas in the Hosseini’s three novels from the perspective of trauma. This paper focuses on how the author uses narratology to show personal and communities’ traumatic experiences in his different novels. At the same time, this thesis combining with the Hosseini’s personal traumatic experience, reveals the author’s contemplation and confusion in the aspect of family, religion, sex, violence which is described in his three novels. Hosseini shows his real concerns on exploring the possibility of curing the psychological trauma, for the majority of the Afghan people even to all the human beings.The thesis consists of five parts. The first chapter is the introduction, introducing the research objects and the basic arguments of trauma theory, the making a general classification and overview of the existing domestic and foreign research results about Hosseini and his novels. The second chapter is mainly the analysis of the text. According to trauma source, in Hosseini’s novels, the trauma themes are divided into three parts, in order to analyze the family trauma, gender trauma and the wounds of war of the novel. By using the theory of narration, from three aspects: double track structure, temporal order transform, point of view and the mode of discourse in close coordination, the third chapter analyzes narrative strategies through portraying the real trauma. The fourth chapter analyzes the Hosseini’s exploration of the trauma recovery, It consists of three steps: firstly, through the escape of the traumatic event, traumatized people reconstructs of a sense of security; secondly, traumatized people talks to the trustworthy listener, so as to directly face the trauma; finally, from giving love, traumatized people establishes stable relationship with significant others or social groups, in order to be away from the trauma. The fifth chapter is the conclusion of this thesis,summarizing the contents of each chapter. Husseini’s three novels focus on the characters of trauma. With Husseini’s simple but powerful language, the figures’ traums vividly display in front of the readers.