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Research Paper | English Language and Literature | Volume 14 Issue 9, September 2025 | Pages: 1584 - 1588 | India
Memory, Trauma, and Identity: Representations of Individual and Collective Experience in Contemporary Fiction
Abstract: This paper examines how contemporary fiction represents the entanglement of memory and trauma in the constitution of individual and collective identity. Drawing on trauma theory, memory studies, and narrative theory, the paper analyzes representative works by Kazuo Ishiguro, Toni Morrison, W. G. Sebald, Ian McEwan, Anne Michaels, Pat Barker, and Julian Barnes to demonstrate how contemporary novelists have developed distinctive narrative strategies for representing experiences of memory and trauma that resist straightforward linear or fully conscious articulation. The analysis is organized around four interrelated concerns: the representation of individual trauma and its disruptive effects upon narrative selfhood and temporal continuity; the literary mediation of collective and historical trauma, including slavery, the Holocaust, and war, as constitutive of cultural memory; the intergenerational transmission of trauma through what memory theorists term "postmemory", by which the descendants of trauma survivors inherit and are shaped by experiences they did not themselves directly witness; and the ethical and formal significance of unreliable, retrospective, and fragmented narration as a means of representing memory's constructed, partial, and often self-protective character. The paper argues that contemporary fiction's sustained formal experimentation in the representation of memory and trauma constitutes not merely an aesthetic innovation but an epistemologically and ethically significant response to the limits of conventional narrative and historiographical representation when confronted with experiences that resist full conscious integration. The paper concludes by considering the broader implications of this body of fiction for understanding the relationship between narrative, memory, and the ongoing constitution of both individual and collective identity.
Keywords: trauma fiction, collective memory, postmemory, narrative identity, contemporary literature, unreliable narration, historical fiction
How to Cite?: Dr. Rehana Abdullah, "Memory, Trauma, and Identity: Representations of Individual and Collective Experience in Contemporary Fiction", Volume 14 Issue 9, September 2025, International Journal of Science and Research (IJSR), Pages: 1584-1588, https://www.ijsr.net/getabstract.php?paperid=SR25926113120, DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.21275/SR25926113120