Date

2018-07-01

Author

Yıldız Bağçe, Hülya

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One of the concerns of D.M. Thomas in his 1981 novel The White Hotel is to make connections between the personal and the collective trauma. But, as the narrative structure of the novel subtly affirms, this connection cannot be made through understanding and representing history in linear, causal narratives. The novel suggests that literature is an access to human suffering and traumatic memory, which, in turn, is communicated to others in narratives. The novel also exemplifies that memory is a historical and political site where meaning is constructed, reconstructed, and recollected. In this article, I examine the representation of traumatic memory in relation to the palimpsest narrative technique of The White Hotel. The article aims to show how Thomas in The White Hotel revises and challenges Freudian psychoanalytical approaches towards traumatic memory, and instead offers a literary construction of traumatic memory, in which he suggests a more complicated approach that takes both the individual and the historical context of trauma into account.

Subject Keywords

The White Hotel, Traumatic memory, Representation of traumatic memory in history and fiction, Postmodern novel and representation of traumatic memory

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/41540

Collections

Department of Foreign Language Education, Article