Effects of Trauma on Language: A Psycholinguistic Analysis of “Terrorist” by John Updike

Abstract

The current research is a psycholinguistic analysis of Updike’s novel “Terrorist” (2006): a novel written in backdrop of Islamophobia. Trauma is a tense psychological state affecting different functions of human body including language reception and language production. A person experiencing blue thoughts and suicidal orientation should be presented with a different language as compared with a normal human being. The premise behind this research is to evaluate the impacts of traumatic conditions on the language of the protagonist and its depiction by the novelist. To set a comparative psycholinguistic analysis of the novel, the researchers apportioned the novel in three phases: Pretrauma phase, trauma phase and post-trauma phase of Ahmad’s life as depicted in the novel. We applied theoretical framework of Cathy Caruth (1996) which accentuates the impacts of trauma on human language. Although, Trauma is the subject matter of psychology but the analysis of language under traumatic conditions builds an interdisciplinary relation between language, literature and psychology. Through textual analysis of the selected texts the researchers
found the novel as a fit trauma narrative and discovered the utilization of the devices as suggested by Cathy Caruth (1996) like traumatic figurative language.