"There were two ways of forgetting": investigating memory and trauma in Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life and Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye

Trauma is so fracturing an experience that it can completely alter the victim. This project uses a close reading of two novels: Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye and Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life to investigate the representation of memory, trauma and recovery. This project will explore the question of how fiction can develop understanding in readers through authentic depictions of trauma. Trauma studies is a multidisciplinary field, located at the convergence of literature studies and psychology. This thesis will be utilising the techniques of close textual analysis, whilst using skills gleaned from literary trauma studies and trauma studies to assess the authors’ narrative techniques and how the texts are able to represent the experience of trauma. These texts were chosen to reflect the diversity of traumatic experiences and recovery trajectories. A Little Life posits that its protagonist’s experiences of abuse were so sever that he was rendered incapable of recovery. Cat’s Eye posits that recovery is possible through art and confronting memories of the event. While novels that represent trauma are often assessed through a lens of authenticity, it is important to consider that an authentic representation of trauma is necessarily subject. My analysis will investigate how both authors use narrative techniques to represent trauma and how, in turn, these narratives reflect societal understandings of trauma at the time in which they were published. Trauma studies contends that trauma is unrepresentable through language. By using these texts, we are able to see how this idea might function in a fictional account of trauma and then assess how readers are altered by their reading experience, gaining an attuned sense of understanding and empathic ability.