A Study Of Trauma In Black Dogs From The Perspective Of Unnatural Narrative

With his exquisite narrative skills,Gothic writing style and deep insight into history and society,Ian Mc Ewan(1948-)is entitled as “Ian Macabre” and “national author”,and has become one of the most famous contemporary British writers.Black Dogs is a work he published in 1992.Based on the European society from 1946 to1989 and the protagonist June’s traumatic experience,this work has boldly narrated the fragmentary and traumatic stories of family’s misfortune,love affair,the collision between mysticism and rationalism,the collapse of faith,the fall of Berlin Wall,the revenge of nature,the entanglement and the salvation of ghosts,the uncanny of black dogs,the brutality of Gestapo as well as the miserable experience of Mrs.Bertrand.Currently,abundant studies are conducted on its trauma,crisis,ethics,empathy,redemption,melancholy,new historicism,Gothic literature,narrative,irony,ecological thought and other aspects.However,few scholars explore the theme of trauma from the perspective of unnatural narrative.Therefore,based on unnatural narratology and trauma theory,this thesis aims at analyzing the traumatic process of the characters in Black Dogs,exploring the role and significance of unnatural narrative elements in the expression of trauma,excavating its rich narrative connotation,revealing the author’s superb creative ability and broadening a new horizon and a new way for interpreting Black Dogs.This thesis is divided into five chapters.The first chapter includes a brief introduction to Ian Mc Ewan and his works,literature review,research significance,thesis framework and theoretical basis.On the level of story,the second chapter uncovers the root causes of June and Jeremy’s family trauma and psychic trauma by tracing the unnatural events of “revenge of the red dragonfly”,“the nonexistent black dogs” and “the salvation and entanglement of ghost”.The third chapter analyzes the unnatural narrative time and space in the novel,and demonstrates the similarity and rationality between unnatural narrative and trauma,such as ambiguous narrative,chaotic logic and elastic thought.On the level of discourse,the fourth chapter analyzes the two unnatural narrative acts in the novel,revealing how the author leads Jeremy to witness and feel June’s trauma in all directions through multi-person narration,and how June reestablishes and arranges her fragmented memories from contradictions and conflicts thus rediscovering herself and finally getting out of trauma in an unreliable way.The fifth chapter mainly explores the art and tension of the combination of unnatural narrative and trauma,and summarizes the whole thesis.The study found that,as an unnatural narrative expert,Mc Ewan represented the symptoms of trauma in an unnatural way,which seemed unreasonable.However,he successfully highlighted the severity and profound impact of trauma in an unusual and even bizarre way.More importantly,the combination of unnatural narrative and trauma theory not only realized a perfect interpretation for the individual trauma process,but also revealed the expression of trauma at the social level,and achieved a dual artistic effect and a sublimation from structural aesthetics to philosophy.