• Trauma Playgrounds: Ludic Experiments and Formal Techniques in Traumatic Childhood Fiction

In the expanding field of trauma literature, the twin demands of form and style have become pivotal to how trauma is narrativised and represented. No longer considered secondary to the work’s content, the formal and stylistic strategies marshalled to depict trauma must themselves bear the scars of that disintegration. To convey trauma’s unassimilable and unspeakable impact, theorists like Anne Whitehead and Roger Luckhurst claim that novels engaging with trauma must exhibit non-linear, elliptical, and recursive qualities, eschewing the classic Aristotelian structure of beginning-middle-end while refuting the neat consolations of order and beauty.

Yet, while these critics have helped codify a set of representational techniques commensurate with the experience of trauma, the works of fiction they analyse predominantly centre on traumatised adult protagonists, leaving the unique epistemologies posed by children aside. Childhood, as its own distinct developmental category, cannot be subsumed under the umbrella of adult experience, and literary discourse must reflect those discrepancies, lest the full continuum of traumatic form becomes homogenised. My thesis thus intervenes in this lacuna by turning to Arundhati Roy’s “The God of Small Things” and Emma Donoghue’s “Room”—two novels that place children at the heart of the traumatic experience.

While both novels are similar in their replication of trauma’s symptomatological structure, they are also animated by a peculiarly ludic sense of play. Such formal qualities of playfulness can be found when the authors juggle language and invent words with new permutational possibilities, engage in hide-and-seek with the reader by dropping narrative clues or withholding information deliberately, and transform the architecture of the text into a dynamic and interactive game. By locating the ludic and the traumatic in the same narrative space and examining these two ostensibly dissonant affective modes, I reveal how play functions as both a puerile coping mechanism and a structuring principle for a traumatised child’s violated inner world.