The Unbearable Agony In Life

Freedom,the fourth novel of American novelist Jonathan Franzen,is a typical story reflecting family emotional life.This neorealist novel represents a grand scene of middle-class' s social life and the deconstructing American family symbols at the background of global consumption economy in and before 21 th century.Narrated with hero's third-person autobiography and memory fragments,adopted plain and simple description to unearth the common defect of the most ordinary American family,Freedom reveals individual's spiritual predicaments when dealing with the relationships with himself,others and nature.Based on trauma theories raised by Judith Herman and other researchers,the author of this thesis tries to explore the individual traumatic experience of the Berglunds,which is quite typical in American middle class,and reveal the trauma theme by close reading and analyzing trauma symptoms,reasons,and recovery process.In the family of origin,emotional violence of different kinds distorts the sound psychological development.While in the jungle of social power,the regulatory power,as “an invisible hand”,always disciplines the protagonists both physically and psychologically.Under the dual oppression,their traumatic memories are oppressed and disturbed,and begin to reappear and dissociate.Protagonists try to have some momentary peace by depending on sensory pleasure and cutting off the social connections,only to find that they get caught unconsciously into negative and extreme emotion defense patterns.To gradually get away from the constraint of freedom and haunting traumas,traumatic writing and recounting are adopted to externalize their painful memories and regain the sense of comfort and safety.And protagonists attempt to step out of their psychological cage and endeavor to build the connection with themselves,others and the outside world,remodeling the sense of trust through returning to the community.“Man was born free,and he is everywhere in chains”.It is not difficult to find out through intensive study that Franzen actually explains the illusory American dream and the traumatic sense freedom brought to different human beings in the modern civilization,expresses his solicitude about spiritual and moral life of common people and humanistic moral concern to ordinary trauma subject.