Trauma, Identity, and Narrative in fiction: A Critique of The Blind Man’s Garden as Trauma Fiction

Trauma relates to the pain that brings violent rupture in the individuals as well as social life of people and leads to collective trauma. The relation between trauma and fiction can be traced in various ways (Whitehead, 2004). The study aims to explore how the theme of trauma is incorporated in a narrative. For this purpose, The Blind Man's Garden by Nadeem Aslam is selected as a fictional base, and Trauma Fiction by Ann Whitehead (2004) is used as a tool to analyze the emotional condition and trauma of Pakistani natives after the war on terror. This study is essentially qualitative and placed within the interpretive paradigm. Twenty passages have been selected from the selected fiction as textual data through non-random sampling techniques. Findings of the study revealed that themes in the selected novel convey the trauma of Pakistani society by using powerful language techniques most effectively. It is also revealed that painful events are embedded in the mind of the individuals thus transforming them into traumatic beings. Resultantly, the individual trauma leads towards the trauma of society as a whole. The study urges future researchers to explore other narratives highlighting the cultural, social, and gender trauma of Pakistani society.