ISSN: 2222-6990
Open access
With racial harmony being the zeitgeist of many political rhetoric across the world, discourses on understanding ethnicities and nations that go through troubled history are as important as ever. Intergenerational trauma is ubiquitous in discussing fictional works that involve themes tantamount to significant events like World War II, racial segregation, gender discrimination in family institutions, and political strife, which is the core of the narrative in Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. The objective of this research is to fill in the gap left in previous research on the presence of trauma, where most of the focus is only on intergenerational trauma aspect of the plot that contributes to the trauma, not on Oscar’s struggles with Dominican identity crisis which resulted from said trauma. The methodology that the research will be using is on exploring Mervyn Bendle’s four modern problems of identity crisis, with the first being that the self is seen as an inner place that can to be examined by the narrator, the second is the idea of human potential, the third being crumbling idea of hierarchy, and lastly, the change of self-definition. The research concludes that the main character’s identity crisis, where he struggles as both an American and a Dominican, is a result of an intergenerational fear towards the long deceased Dominican Republic’s infamous dictator, Rafael Trujillo. The trauma was reinforced in the protagonist’s upbringing, causing him to bear consistent resentment towards society in his brief lifetime. It is suggested that future research examine other ethnicities or communities affected by similar intergenerational traumas in other works of fiction, so a much greater case can be built in gaining better insight on how such external tormentor can be a burden on generations to come.
Al-Massani, H. (2018). Uncovering The Traumatic Characters In Toni Morrison’s Beloved. In ResearchGate (p. 98). University of Mosul.
American Psychiatric Association. (2000). Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5®) (4th ed.). American Psychiatric Pub.
Archer, S. L. (1982). The Lower Age Boundaries of Identity Development. Child Development, 6, 1551. https://doi.org/10.2307/1130083
Balaev, M. (2014). Literary Trauma Theory Reconsidered. In Contemporary Approaches in Literary Trauma Theory (p. 150). Palgrave Macmillan.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/9781137365941.0004
Baumeister, R. F., & Muraven, M. (1996). Identity as Adaptation to Social, Cultural, and Historical Context. Journal of Adolescence, 5, 405–416.
https://doi.org/10.1006/jado.1996.0039
Bendle, M. F. (2002). The Crisis of ‘Identity’ in High Modernity. The British Journal of Sociology, 1, 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/00071310120109302
Carey, B. (2018). Can We Really Inherit Trauma? - The New York Times. The New York Times - Breaking News, US News, World News and Videos; The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/10/health/mind-epigenetics-genes.html
Caruth, C. (1991). Unclaimed Experience. JHU Press.
Caruth, C. (1995). Trauma (p. 11). JHU Press.
Díaz, J. (2008). The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Penguin.
Erikson, E. H. (1968). Identity: Youth and Crisis (pp. 2, 212). W. W. Norton & Company.
Farell, K. (1998). Post-Traumatic Culture: Injury and Interpretation in the Nineties. Choice Reviews Online, 08, 36-4345-36–4345. https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.36-4345
Fly, J. W., & Reinhart, G. R. (1980). Racial Separation During the 1970s: The Case of Birmingham. Social Forces, 4, 1255. https://doi.org/10.2307/2577323
Gustavson, M. (2021). There is No There There Anymore?: The Representation of Collective and Cultural Trauma in Tommy Orange’s There There (p. 14). Linnaeus University, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Department of Languages.
Hamilton, J. (2020). Monsters and Post Traumatic Stress: An Experiential-Processing Model of Monster Imagery in Psychological Therapy, Film and Television. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 1. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-020-00628-2
Intrator, J., Tannen, J., & Massey, D. S. (2016). Segregation by race and income in the United States 1970–2010. Social Science Research, 45–60.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssresearch.2016.08.003
James, E. C. (2018). The Enduring Usefulness of Erikson’s Concept of the Identity Crisis in the 21st Century: An Analysis of Student Mental Health Concerns, Identity. Taylor Francis Online. https://doi.org/10.1080/15283488.2018.1524328
Kluft, R. P., & Foote, B. (1999). Special Section: Dissociative Disorders Richard P. Kluft, M.D., and Brad Foote, M.D. (Guest Editors). American Journal of Psychotherapy, 3, 283–288. https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.psychotherapy.1999.53.3.283
LaCapra, D. (2004). History in Transit (p. 108). Cornell University Press.
Luckhurst, R. (2013). The Trauma Question (p. 1). Routledge.
Manley, E. (2012). Intimate Violations: Women and the Ajusticiamiento of Dictator Rafael Trujillo, 1944-1961. The Americas, 1, 61–94. https://doi.org/10.1353/tam.2012.0050
Parks, G. S., & Hughey, M. W. (2017). “A Choice of Weapons”: The X-Men and the Metaphor of Racial Equalit. SSRN Electronic Journal. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2552983
Rogers, N. (2004). The Representation of Trauma in Narrative (p. 13). University of Warwick.
Schultz, D., & Schultz, S. (2004). Theories of Personality. Wadsworth Publishing Company.
Tal, K. (2004). Worlds of Hurt (p. 15). Cambridge University Press.
VanWormer, J. (2020). Trauma Begetting Trauma: Fuku, Masks, and Implicit Forgiveness In The Works Of Junot Díaz. Chapman University Digital Commons, . https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.36837/chapman.000197
Vukeli?, A. (2020). Othering, Resistance and Recovery in Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye. ELOPE: English Language Overseas Perspectives and Enquiries, 1, 29–40. https://doi.org/10.4312/elope.17.1.29-40
In-Text Citation: (Hamid, 2022)
To Cite this Article: Hamid, M. H. A. (2022). Identity Crisis Through Intergenerational Trauma in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. International Journal of Academic Research in Business and Social Sciences, 12(1), 1478 – 1488.
Copyright: © 2022 The Author(s)
Published by Human Resource Management Academic Research Society (www.hrmars.com)
This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) license. Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of this article (for both commercial and non0-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full terms of this license may be seen at: http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode