Trauma In Anne Enright's The Gathering

Anne Enright is one of the well accredited Irish novelists of our time. In all her novels that she has written, The Gathering has remained the masterpiece in her career up to the present. Since its first publication in 2007,The Gathering has proved that Enright is an influential novelist with appealing skills as she knits human sufferings with her profound theme of trauma. Putting trauma at the centre of her discussion, Enright has contributed to the existing trauma literature. Although Enright's works have a unique style and theme in her focus on motherhood, The Gathering has stridden a long step in showing the contribution of mother to the sufferings of innocent individuals. Using a postmodern narrator whose narration mainly relies on memory, Enright is able to evoke the long-buried secret that becomes the source of the painful life of an innocent child through adulthood. It is beyond doubt that the novel is a best example of the way trauma can penetrate and destroy the future of an individual.Various studies on Enright have been focused on her deep concern on the role of mother as the basis for social development. Enright has always put mother at her focal point in her discussion of social issues, and from that she has been able to show that mother plays a major role in social advancement. Other researchers have also excavated Enright's works on family, love and relationship showing how the aforementioned themes can either be the source of happiness or the reasons for sufferings of others. In other studies, the questions of subjectivity and trauma have been discussed as delineated in The The Gathering. It has been propounded that there is a subjective tendency in the narrator's claims because she has been personally affected by the pains of the other.Subjectivity has been discussed as a hidden attribute of the narrator's claim because of her closeness to the victim. Other studies dig out the trauma especially in connection to memory and testimony. This thesis then is intended to reveal the trauma in The Gathering by focusing on depiction of the trauma symptoms, the way an individual's trauma can relate to others, and the healing function of memory and testimony.This thesis is composed of five chapters.Chapter One is the introduction, which introduces Enright and The Gathering, gives a survey of various studies on Enright's works and studies on trauma in other literary works, and explains the focus and structure of the thesis.Chapter Two is focused on the depiction of the cause of trauma and trauma symptoms. It first reveals the causes of the trauma depicted in the novel, and then demonstrates Liam's depression and Veronica's post traumatic stress disorder with textual evidence.Chapter Three discusses the negative impact of trauma. It not only shows how an individual's adult life can be destroyed by his traumatic experience in childhood, and how the negative impact of an individual's trauma can extend to people around him.Chapter Four focuses on neutralization of traumatic memory. It reveals the role of memory and giving testimony in healing the deep wounds caused by trauma. By confronting her painful memory and telling about it, the survivor Veronica, unlike the direct victim, is able to neutralize her traumatic memory and even experiences growth after recovery.The last chapter concludes the study by giving a brief summary of the previous discussions in the thesis showing the important details in each chapter.