Retracing Violence and Trauma in the 20th Century American Novels: William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929), and Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (1929)

Abstract

The human psyche wades in the sea of trauma with a drowning body by dint of cultural, historical, political and economic grounds. The former enlarges the psychological wound making it fester into violent and/or disturbed identities. It is well-established that the notion of trauma has confronted us not only as a mere pathology, but also as a mystery with regards to the psyche’s relation to reality. This study aims at finding a link between violence and trauma, for that it chronologically investigates its effects on identity in reference to modernist postbellum American works via; William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929), and Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (1929). Each in their own right helped weave a comprehensible and overarching representation of sundry types of violence and trauma. Therefore, through these designated works, and the review of the literature on the notions of violence, trauma, and identity, this research attempts to explore the history of trauma, modern interpretation of the different types of violence, and elucidates the radical change in modern life with its long-term impact on the identity of modern society. Grounded in analyses of power and culture, this study employs Slavoj Žižek’s tripartite model of violence to scrutinise the chasm between subjective outbursts and the systemic, “objective” forces that sustain social oppression and war. The findings reveal that while violence and trauma fracture the self, they also operate as generative forces. Rather than restoring identity to pre-traumatic state, trauma reshapes it through an ethical labour of memory, resulting in a model of post-traumatic persistence grounded in endurance, responsibility, and bearing witness to historical rupture.