Trauma and space in Patricia Sarrafian Ward’s The bullet collection

Abstract

This thesis examines the spatiality of trauma in Patricia Sarrafian Ward’s The Bullet Collection, and it links this spatiality to the notion of working through trauma. Combining a text-led close reading of Ward’s novel and contemporary notions of place and the body, this thesis analyzes the correlation between trauma and space, that is place and the body, and writing to a lesser extent, to examine whether trauma can be worked through via space. In the first chapter of the thesis, a definition of trauma will be presented and related to trauma theory, and the spatiality of trauma will be explored profoundly. A third section will examine recovery in trauma and reveal the role of narration in healing from traumatic experiences. The concept of space per se will then be described and delimited for the purposes of the thesis. The scholarship on the novel will also be surveyed in light of Ward’s labeling as an Arab American and Anglophone Lebanese postwar writer. The second chapter of the thesis will examine the relationship between trauma and geographical space, while the third chapter will explore the correlation between trauma and corporeal space, and to a lesser extent textual space. In the second chapter, it will be shown that placemaking and re-inhabitation of places even in the context of exile correlate with working through trauma. The third chapter will show that trauma can be voiced through the foreign and transformed body, whereas self-mutilation remains a futile means to work through trauma and may only lead to transitory moments of comfort and agency. In addition, this chapter will establish the narrator’s trauma narrative as emerging from her healing wounds. This study concludes that trauma is more efficiently worked through via places which are constructed by the body, than via the body itself. The findings of this thesis also seem to contest readings which have found the ending of The Bullet Collection to be dismal. The characters’ working through their traumas via re-inhabi