earticle

영어

Trauma theory reconstructs the relationship between the reader and the text as a “witness” to trauma, so that reading itself demands political, ethical, and aesthetic practices. The reader who analyzes a literary text as a testimony can become an interpreter and therapist. Furthermore, the recovered text which has revealed and healed its trauma eventually builds the bridges of understanding between sympathetic interpreters and traumatic experiences. Therefore, this paper aims to analyze how the literary text provides access to history related to individual experiences, traumas, and memories in Edwidge Danticat's The Dew Breaker, which consists of nine short stories. Her narrative text as a short story cycle imbricates—the diasporic lives of Haitain Americans as victimizers/victims and—the hanging lives of local Haitians as survivors/preys under the influence of Duvalier’s dictatorship that used torture, murder, rape, imprisonment and so on. The three main stories based on the Biennaimés—“The Book of the Dead”, “The Book of Miracles”, and “The Dew Breaker”—respectively offer a beginning, a middle, and an end to Dnaticat’s fiction. Such a textual structure takes a centripetal force to draw in the other six short stories—“Seven”, “Water Child”, “Night Talkers”, “The Bridal Seamstress”, “Monkey Tails”, and “Funeral Singers”. Mr. Biennaimé, a hunter and victimizer as Tontons Macoute/the dew breaker/fat man under the brutal reign of dictator Papa Doc in Haiti, plays an important role as social glue, for he connects other characters as a member of a whole community without distinction of race, gender, and class. The Biennaimés’ own memories and traumas have effects on their daughter, Ka, and other characters. Danticat creates various characters including Ka, Danny, Aline, Michel, and Nadine as agents of reinscribing and reconstructing their parents's memories and traumas, for they become not only listeners to victimizers’ confessions but also tolerators of victims’ silence and inarticulation.