War, Violence and Trauma Narratives in Literature

The twentieth century, no doubt, is a murderous century in which a million violent deaths occurred due to the First World War, the Second World War, and the outbreak of different Civil Wars. Hence, any war undoubtedly can devastate any country or society, having a profound and distressing impact on individuals as well as society as a whole. The reasons behind any war/violence can be ethnocentrism, ethnic persecution, economic exploitation, racism, and religious persecution, etc., which have always been a dominant force and long-occupying phenomenon in different literary discussions and genres. Across various centuries, literary writers have drawn inspiration from such conflicts and share them through their literary writings, representing violence and mass murder not only of their ages but also of different ages with new literary forms and techniques. Stephen Carne’s The Red Badge of Courage, Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West and Anthony Swofford’s Jarhead comprehend and encompass various battlefield horrors unveiling the underlying clash of a society/country. Readers sometimes read them to get to know and understand their own experiences through characters inflicted with the chaos of war and violence. On the other hand, massive trauma and post-traumatic stress also become a matter of concern for different literary writers like Arundhati Roy, Jhumpa Lahiri, Joanna Schaffhausen, Lidia Yuknavitch, Michael Robotham, Patrick McGrath, Rohinton Mistry, Roxane Gay, Toni Morrison, Virginia Woolf, and psychoanalytic theorists like Abram Kardiner, Jean‐Martin Charcot, Morton Prince, Pierre Janet, and Sigmund Freud. They convey the profound loss and intense fear, the cultural and psychological impact of the trauma of an individual or a group of individuals.