The problem of traumatic experience in J. Harris’s novel “Five Quarters of the Orange”

   The article is based on J. Harris’s novel “Five Quarters of the Orange” (2001) and traces the tendencies in depicting World War II in English literature; it examines the problem of the traumatic experience of World War II in modern British literature, as this war was one of the most traumatic episodes of world history. In the 20^th century, according to trauma studies, the theme of World War II received a new development in fiction, the writers’ focus shifted from a large-scale description of the war horrors to the private lives of certain social groups, namely children. In her work, J. Harris examines the period of collaborationism, traumatic for France, in the way children, direct participants of the relationship between the French and Germans, viewed it. J. Harris creates a number of “tricks” that help reconcile the reader with the characters’ peaceful interactions with the Germans; the author does it by using traditional narrative techniques: introducing a heroine-narrator, connecting two temporal layers (the past and the present of Framboise Dartigen), as well as using an additional narrative basis in the form of a handwritten book. One of these tricks is the constant narrator’s commentary, explaining her childhood actions and motives. At the plot level, traumatic events are associated not only with the actions of the Germans (for example, violence against Ren-Claude), but also with the actions of the French villagers, who take revenge on the protagonist’s family for their own relatives. Thus, the article deals with the representation of traumatic experience in the novel; moreover, we face various forms of trauma in it. Such multilevel organization of the text allows J. Harris to realize the generally accepted point of view associated with the disfavor of collaborationism at the plot level and, at the same time, to provide an opportunity for a complex and ambiguous characterization of the historical events at the narrative and authorial level.

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