The trauma of witnessing death in Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and Sinan Antoon's The Corpse Washer

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Tezin Türü: Yüksek Lisans

Tezin Yürütüldüğü Kurum: Dokuz Eylül Üniversitesi, Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü, Amerikan Kültürü ve Edebiyatı, Türkiye

Tezin Onay Tarihi: 2022

Tezin Dili: İngilizce

Öğrenci: SİMGE ŞİRİN

Danışman: Esra Çöker

Açık Arşiv Koleksiyonu: AVESİS Açık Erişim Koleksiyonu

Özet:

In representations of trauma the past event is apparent in narratives beyond the witness’s recognition. Consequently, trauma narratives demand contextual analyses. Witnessing death arising from historical violent events can best be analyzed with literary trauma theory. Thus, the aim of this thesis is to focus on the trauma of witnessing death and its aftermath in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005) and Sinan Antoon’s The Corpse Washer (2013). In Foer’s novel, narrators witness the two traumatic historical events, the first is the Dresden firebombing in 1945 and the second is the September 11, 2001 attacks and they go through the trauma of bereavement. In The Corpse Washer, representation of trauma is conveyed through the analogy of death caused by the US invasion of Iraq and its narrator is a corpse washer. In both novels “death encounter” emerging from witnessing death in these violent events is the common experience for the witness narrators. Accordingly, narrators fail to respond to the trauma since they are affected by the presence of death which means bereavement in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and washing dead bodies in The Corpse Washer. This study indicates that first-person narrators in both novels develop a narrative without recognizing the trauma of “death encounter” since it silences them.