Escaping the Unbearable : Trauma, Fragmented Identities, and Constructed Realities in Shutter Island and Slaughterhouse-Five

Sammanfattning

This essay examines how trauma shapes identity, perception, and the construction of reality in Dennis Lehane’s Shutter Island and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five by drawing on psychoanalytic trauma theory and trauma as belated, intrusive, and incomprehensible. The uncanny, dreams, and the death drive further contribute to the essay by illuminating how repression, repetition, and self-destructive impulses emerge in response to overwhelming loss and guilt. In addition, the theory of trauma narratives provides a literary framework for analysing how split chronology, fragmented perspectives, and imaginative reconstructions reflect the traumatised subjects. Through close reading of key conversations, dreams, and narrative structures, this essay examines different forms of traumatic response in the protagonist Teddy Daniels and Billy Pilgrim, suggesting that their respective realities may function as psychological survival mechanisms that lead to constructed realities.