The Recovery Of Jeremy's Trauma In Black Dogs

Ian McEwan,who won national and international fame in the 1970 s,is a popular British writer with both commercial and literary success.As a professional writer,McEwan has lived by writing for nearly a quarter of a century,and his works are granted many awards.Published in 1992 as the second finalist for the Booker Prize,McEwan's Black Dogs presents a story about the recovery of a trauma survivor.With Jeremy as the narrator,the novel reveals different people's depression in different times.It is in the process of recording and exploring those depressive memories that Jeremy recovers from a survivor.Based on trauma theory,the present thesis mainly applies Herman's conception to analyze the healing process of how Jeremy transforms from a traumatized man to an ordinary one.Jeremy's recovery is a process about restoring connection between the public and private worlds and between the individual and the community.Establishing safety and reconstructing the trauma story are used as the ways to cure Jeremy,both of which contribute to the achievement of the final recovery,i.e.,restoring the connection between the survivor and the community.Since no other therapeutic work can succeed if safety is not adequately secured,as the first task of recovery,Jeremy's establishment of safety is discussed in the first chapter.Due to his identity as an orphanand the unsafe living environment,Jeremy suffers from a lacking of safety.In other words,Jeremy has no sense of belonging,and the loss of a sense of belonging is reflected in his loss of power and of control of his body and emotion.Jeremy fails to establish his safety by pretending to be Sally's parent and making friends with others families,and it is not until he becomes a real parent and gains a healthy and loving home that he succeeds in establishing his safety.Then the present thesis deals with the second stage of recovery—Jeremy tells the story of Europe's trauma as a European.As a member of Europe,Jeremy feels the cultural depression of the European people—the deliberate forgetting of the violent history and inaction towards evil.Most Europeans including Jeremy suffer from the common trauma symptoms of cultural depression,but Jeremy plays the role of a discloser,who faces the trauma directly and tries to reconstruct the trauma story.The existence of the Holocaust history and human vulnerability and capacity for evil are the causes of Europe's cultural depression.In order to recover from the trauma,Jeremy reconstructs Europe's trauma story about Holocaust,and unblinkingly faces the evil that exists in the past and at present.Detailed analysis is given in the third chapter to the ways for Jeremy to gain his final recovery—the reconnection with ordinary life.Jeremy's lacking of basic trust in the world and his sense of guilt towards the thenstill suffering survivors result in his disconnection,which is fully manifested as his crisis of faith and self-isolation.Jeremy's restoring connection is based on his establishment of safety and reconstructing of Europe's story: establishing safety helps Jeremy deepen his relationships with others and believe the redemptive power of love;in the process of telling Europe's story,Jeremy realizes the necessity of facing and remembering evils,fights with his sense of hopelessness and loneliness,and finally reconciles with himself.Through analyzing Jeremy's recovery from trauma,the present thesis attempts not only to explore Jeremy's change from a survivor to an ordinary people,but also point out Ian McEwan's compassion and humanist solicitude for traumatized people and his eulogy for the courage of remembering evil and the redeeming power of love.