Belatedness of Trauma, Self-Reflexive Conscious and Narrative Vicissitude in Child in Time
Abstract
McEwan’s narrative strategy associates with his attempt at a psychic exploration of characters in Child in Time (1987). In terms of the trauma representation under the third-person perspective, McEwan is in favor of the objective panoramic angle to reveal the trauma origin, traumatic moment, and the characters’ post-traumatic life. The omniscient narration elaborates on the misery of the protagonist and indicates the stress spreading all over his life by presenting the traumatic events in a temporal narrative framework consisting of memory flashback and flash-forward. This study explores the metaphoric implications of chronotope narrative (Mikhael Bakhtin’s (1981) term for the inseparability of time and space) for projecting the psychological syndrome of the traumatized character whose self-reflexive conscious highlights post-traumatic stress through a narrative focus on the belatedness of trauma representation in temporal facets. This representation of enduring traumatic aftermath, as a cause of an individual’s estrangement from others and community, proposes that McEwan’s sympathy with individual trauma expands to an ethical and social critique.