(In honour of tommorrows screening of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close I thought I might dust off this old essay of mine. I don’t know if its any good but the process was probably the most enjoyable that I’ve had writing a piece of theory. )

The catharsis of fiction: Narrative therapy as a coping mechanism in the works of Foer and Vonnegut.

In their books on the psychological devastation of war, Slaughterhouse-Five and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, respective authors Kurt Vonnegut and Jonathon Safran Foer both portray protagonists, in Billy Pilgrim and Oskar Schell, who suffer from intense mental trauma due to their personal involvement in the conflicts of their time. Although the nature of war; its technology, logistics and guidelines, did change dramatically during the fifty plus years separating the settings of the two texts the horrific events at their core are remarkably similar, as is the way that the two victims attempt to deal with the ripples and repercussions caused by these tragedies. In his novel Vonnegut gives us a fractured look into the mind of a man broken by his first hand experiences during the Second World War, in particular the unimaginable destruction during the bombing of Dresden. Foer on the other hand tells the more modern story of a boy orphaned by the events of 9/11 and his attempts to avoid the realities of a post 9/11 world. Although the perspectives and politics vary greatly between the novels both of these protagonists have had their lives forever changed by one distinct and unknowable moment, surviving a massacre.  Both Oskar and Billy are left traumatised by a combination of Post-traumatic stress disorder, Survivors guilt and a sudden loss of control but as psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton argues that “above all the survivor’s preoccupation is with meaning. How can I understand this vastly death-saturated event? And if I can’t understand it, I can’t understand or deal with the rest of my life.[i]” It is this unending cycle of fixation and avoidance stemming from traumatic events that so debilitates many of its sufferers, however in both of these texts the protagonists and their authors – who wrote the texts under the inspiration of the same trauma as their characters – unknowingly implement a particularly relevant coping mechanism in and through their novels as a way of finding meaning and breaching the cycle, that being narrative therapy.

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