Published Paper Details:

This paper examines the representation of trauma, memory, and recovery in Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987) and Nicholas Spark's Safe Haven (2010) through the combined frameworks of trauma theory and psychoanalysis. Drawing on Cathy Caruth's concept of trauma's belated temporality, the analysis highlights how Morrison's nonlinear narrative structure and fragmented voices replicate the disorienting experience of traumatic memory, while Sparks employs suspense-driven flashbacks to dramatize the persistent threat of abuse within a linear, romance-thriller framework. The study borrows from Freud's psychoanalytic concepts, particularly the "return of the repressed," and Dominick LaCapra's distinction between "acting out" and "working through" to illuminate how Sethe and Katie navigate the intrusion of past trauma into their present lives. As Judith Herman emphasizes, recovery is a relational process that depends on safety, remembrance, and reconnection, a framework that resonates with both Sethe's communal healing and Katie's reliance on supportive relationships to confront abuse. Furthermore, Caruth's insistence that trauma resists full narrative integration underscores why both Morrison and Sparks stage memory as fractured, intrusive, and yet ethically necessary to articulate. In this way, both texts demonstrate the centrality of memory, repression, and relational support in negotiating trauma, highlighting literature's capacity to mediate between the ethical imperatives of witnessing suffering and the human desire for emotional closure.