A Study Of Trauma In Louise Erdrich’s The Master Butchers Singing Club

Louise Erdrich is a modern American Native woman author who specializes in children’s literature,poetry,and novels.In the literary world,she is recognized for her delicate brushwork and poetic language.She is excellent in exploring subjects such as identity blending,faith,mortality,and violence via incisive language and unique views,displaying the nostalgia and problems of Indian ancestry and bringing to light marginal histories that mainstream culture has ignored.The Master Butchers Singing Club exemplifies the author’s final works,which is filled with obvious trauma.Based on the aforesaid background,the thesis intends to conduct a trauma study of The Master Butchers Singing Club.In the opening chapter of the thesis,the author’s life and The Master Butchers Singing Club are briefly introduced,followed by a summary of the research status of the work at home and abroad,trauma theory,and the importance of the thesis.The second chapter examines the traumatic phenomena and reasons of the main characters in The Master Butchers Singing Club.The main trauma categories of the novel’s characters are family trauma,war trauma,and racial trauma.Symptoms of trauma include excessive alertness,hallucinations,sadness,silence,and memory invasion,revealing the author’s observations on war,racial identity,and the holocaust.The third chapter discusses trauma healing.The protagonists in the novel mostly repair traumas through recreating intimacy and professional identity,using music therapy,and recalling history,offering a fresh perspective on trauma healing approaches.Furthermore,Erdrich rewrites historical facts using a variety of trauma narrative strategies and completes the author’s own trauma recovery through writing.Erdrich abandons the writing tradition of multi-role narration in favor of exploring the deep and hidden psychological trauma about marginal figures of German American and Indian origin through interposed narrative and the third person omniscient perspective often utilized by whites;simultaneously,the author covertly portrays the character’s varied trauma through repetition and metaphor in the form of geographical setting and psychological description.The fourth chapter is the conclusion,which summarizes main findings,research significance,limitations,and suggestions for future research.Louise Erdrich combines personal emotions from individual memories with grand themes such as collective trauma in historical contexts.The descriptions in the book show her combined focus on trauma recovery as well as anti-war and anti-racial discrimination themes,unquestionably giving innovative and original aesthetic notions for American trauma literature.