A STUDY ON SURVIVAL, MEMORY AND POST-WAR TRAUMATIC SUFFERINGS IN ANUK ARUDPRAGASAM'S 'THE STORY OF A BRIEF MARRIAGE'

In the era of civil war all over the world, the aftereffects of war are traumatic and its sufferings are unimaginable. World literature is replete with narratives and sufferings of war. Unlike professional historians who investigate, theorize, and interpret, novelists attempt to reconstruct, personalize, and humanize the inhumanity of global war. The vision is relieved by hopeful thoughts of survival, which ends the sometimes overwhelming empathy. Though the likelihood of our paths touching again is slim, that recollection reminds us that our thoughts will always be intertwined. The chosen text highlights the powerful fictional memoirs of victims or survivors in war fiction, based on the parallels and shifts in post-traumatic mythology. The present paper highlights an analytical model of such war trauma fiction and it applies such a framework to understand the existence of traumatic flashes in the selected text and observe suffering in both physical and emotional states. The fragmented disruption of identity and reality of an individual’s psychological, personal, and temporal reflects the fractures of the war. This study further explores the protagonists’ loss of self-identity, the memory of displacement, separation, physical trauma, and separation from a family which in-depth affects his self for the act of survival.