Mixing memory and denial. Claiming and coping with traumatic experience

Trauma has been part of the stuff of both history and literature across the ages, though its exploration has grown more systematic over the last century and a half, with the suffering caused by war at its center. Twenty-five years after September 11, thirty years after the Lajpat Nagar bombings, and thirty years since the publication of Infinite Jest, trauma remains a negotiation between remembering and refusing to remember. Reading Don DeLillo's Falling Man, Karan Mahajan's The Association of Small Bombs, Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things, and David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest together, this book asks what literature offers that clinical and historical discourse cannot. It examines how fiction creates a symbolic space in which fragmented identity is provisionally reassembled, denial is exposed rather than endured, and readers are drawn into an ethically charged encounter with suffering. Terrorism, colonial violence, addiction, and the modern economy of attention are treated here as facets of a single underlying problem: how trauma is represented, and how it is survived.