Comparative Analysis Of Psychological And Childhood Trauma In The Almond Tree And In The Kite Runner: A Study Of Cultural Trauma And Collective Identity.

This research paper aims to provide a comparative and critical view of the psychological and childhood traumas presented in both The Almond Tree by Michelle Cohen Corasanti and The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini in order to better understand how trauma defines personal and communal identity. Following the theoretical perspectives from Suzanne Keen, Jeffrey C. Alexander, Neil J. Smelser, Ron Eyerman, and Piotr Sztompka, the analysis explores the symbols and meanings of trauma in these novels. This is due to the fact that Keen's narrative empathy theory is helpful to explain how the characters' emotional worlds are built and thus, the reader gets a better insight of the characters' possible psychological traumas. Cultural trauma theory by Alexander deals with the loss of a collective identity due to conflict and displacement in The Almond Tree. Similarly Smelser theory of Collective behaviour focuses on the social reaction to the trauma in both novels. Eyerman's social memory theory focuses on the process of remembering and cultural distribution of traumatic experiences and Sztompka's social trauma theory educates about collective conditioning, shock and loss in culture. In doing so, this paper shows how literature reveals the role of the written and spoken word in mitigating or magnifying trauma, along with the ways in which literature elicits concern, identification, and additional layers of oligophyleptic acculturation in depicting human survival or perseverance across the life span. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]