Japanese Americans Identity Crisis And Reconstruction From The Perspective Of Trauma Theory

No No Boy and Farewell to Manzanar are two Japanese American novels.Obvious traumatic factors permeate all aspects of two works,so the thesis will use trauma theory to study No No Boy and Farewell to Manzanar.This study aims to explore Japanese Americans’ identity crisis and recovery through the comparative analysis of the traumas of the two generations of Japanese Americans: Issei and Nisei.The two Japanese American novels,No No Boy and Farewell to Manzanar are taken as examples.This thesis sets the study in Japanese American literature inevitably concerning with conflicts of Japanese culture and the dominant American culture.The conflicts of two cultures cause the unforgettable traumas and identity crises to the two generations of Japanese Americans.However,their responses to the traumas are quite different due to their choices of cultural identities.Therefore,this study attempts to investigate their distinct responses to the traumas and predicament by an examination of two novels of Japanese American literature: No No Boy and Farewell to Manzanar,in order to illustrate that one’s identity crisis is closely connected with his or her individual psychology trauma and cultural trauma.After a comprehensive and in-depth comparative analysis of the cultural traumas and psychological traumas the two generations of Japanese Americans suffer,and identity crises and dilemma they confront,the thesis finds that Issei,who suffer much more in cultural trauma than Nisei,are doomed to depart from American culture,and their trauma can not be repaired for ever,since cultural trauma is a kind of collective hurt experience,only to recover in the whole cultural system.At the same time,the author of the thesis hopes to help readers understand Japanese American works from a new perspective,and also hopes to make contribution to the application of trauma theory into analyzing literary works.