Fragmented Self in Sinan Antoon’s The Corpse Washer: A literary Examination of Trauma and Identity

Abstract

This study examines psychological disintegration in Sinan Antoon's novel The Corpse Washer (2013), focusing on Jawad's Iraq War experiences. Trauma Theory is used to study how the war's cruelty fragmented Jawad's and Iraqi society's sense of self. Trauma theory of fragmentation is used to study Jawad's emotional and psychological influences as a corpse washer, which exposes him to post-war Iraq's prevalent violence and loss. The article compares Jawad's lacks to the nation to show how conflict terminates remembrance, identity, and culture. The research argues that Jawad's identity fragmentation is symbolic of war's social collapses and emphasizes the importance of memory, ritual, and cultural traditions in time of war recovery. However, this study improves to the discussion on trauma and identity in modern Middle Eastern literature by investigating how the one’s self is re-formed after the conflict.