Beyond the Unspeakable: A Plural Testimony of Traumatic Catharsis in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Allison Dorothy’s Bastard Out of Carolina, and Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life

This thesis examines the relationship between trauma and narrative in the novels of Beloved by Toni Morrison, Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison, and A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, with the aim of investigating the possibility of healing, containing, controlling, and overcoming trauma through narrative. The selected works emphasize the crucial role of narrative representation in conveying the emotional and psychological realities of characters affected by trauma, thus challenging the concept of the “unspeakable” introduced by scholar Cathy Caruth in early Trauma Studies. Using literary techniques such as stream of consciousness, nonlinear narrative structure, and multiple perspectives, the authors provide readers with access to the silenced voices of trauma survivors, highlighting the importance of acknowledging the impact of trauma on individuals and society to achieve post-traumatic acceptance and a sense of closure that includes a plural testimony. The first chapter provides an introduction to trauma studies, from the psychiatric definition of trauma to the emergence of Trauma Studies in the 1990s, and explores new approaches, including feminist, transgenerational, postcolonial, intersectional, and pluralist perspectives. The second chapter analyzes Toni Morrison’s Beloved, which portrays the encounter with the unspeakable both through different literary devices and the uncanny character of Beloved, providing a testimony of slavery and black community’s history. The third chapter observes Bone’s cathartic self-narrative in Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina, emphasizing the importance of self-reframing in metabolizing personal trauma and recreating the self after trauma. Finally, the fourth chapter focuses on the limits of trauma storytelling in Yanagihara’s A Little Life, illustrating the unspeakable through Jude’s endless traumatic experiences and demonstrating the limitations of narrative catharsis in an excessively traumatic narrative. By analyzing these three fiction novels, I have demonstrated that fiction narrative can be an excellent tool for understanding and thus overcoming the “unspeakable” trauma, producing an environment where the expression of traumatic experiences creates a new compassionate post-traumatic social identity.