Narrative Dis/Repair: Interlinked Stories, Trauma, and Narrative Repair

Abstract

This Ph.D. thesis is composed of two parts: a collection of interlinked stories and a critical study that investigates the same form. The story collection, Not That Far from Tel Aviv, entwines the autobiographical and the fictional, the realistic and the supernatural, the historical and the speculative. The stories involve themes such as life in Israel, home/homeland, war, the Shoa, and intergenerational trauma. With the creative part of my thesis deploying the form of interlinked stories, the critical research focuses on this literary form and, more specifically, its relationship with narratives of trauma. Looking at three collections of interlinked stories—Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, Micheline Aharonian Marcom’s Three Apples Fell from Heaven, and Denis Johnson’s Jesus' Son—my study argues that this literary form reflects narratives of trauma and thus increases their impact and enables a resonant narrative repair. The question at the heart of this thesis, therefore, is: how does the form of interlinked stories enable the representation of trauma and enact a form of narrative repair? While the traditional realist novel provides details to create an environment in which the narrative unfolds, collections of interlinked stories often give only the minimally required details and are therefore better designed to deliver disjointed storytelling. I argue that the disjointed nature of interlinked stories reflects and augments the sense of chaos, crisis, and mental and physical breakdown that are typical of war, genocide, and addiction—the themes of the books examined in this study. Moreover, this literary form allows authors to entwine different time periods and merge a variety of styles and genres, which further highlights the disjointed nature of interlinked stories. Consistent across all three story collections is the narrative repair that concludes the books. Practices of storytelling complement processes of healing and of honoring the dead, allowing survivors and storytellers to find some sense of reparative community at last. Conducting the critical research and writing my story collection had a mutually beneficial effect. While my writing was influenced by my growing understanding of this literary form and its relationship with narratives of trauma, my analysis of the examined three books and the various critical thesis was at times informed by my creative journey.