Narrativizing Trauma in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated and Nicole Krauss’s The History of Love
Narrativizing Trauma in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated and Nicole Krauss’s The History of Love

Summary/Abstract: Jonathan Safran Foer and Nicole Krauss, husband and wife, third-generation survivors of the Holocaust, both address in their works the problem of trauma as well as the appropriate responses to it. Both writers investigate histories of Jewish suffering, constructing protagonists who struggle with traumatic memories of violence and victimization. Their work reflects Cathy Caruth’s view on trauma as a point of encounter with the other since, “one’s trauma is tied up with another,” leading “to the encounter with another, through the very possibility of and surprise of listening to another’s wound (8)”. The two novels under analysis also illustrate Caruth’s view that history and trauma are tightly connected to each other: “history, like trauma, is never simply one’s own… [H]istory is precisely the way we are implicated in each other’s trauma” (Unclaimed 24). This essay will scrutinize the nature of this implication by exploring the management of empathy as well as the narrative techniques employed by the two writers in order to achieve this effect.

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