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Narrating Trauma in Hoda Barakat's The Tiller of Waters and Don DeLillo's Falling Man

Trauma theorists argue that narration is a powerful healing tool that enables the integration of the traumatic experience in trauma victims. When trauma survivors reconstruct their trauma memories into a coherent narrative, healing occurs. This paper examines the empowering role of narration for trauma victims in Hoda Barakat's The Tiller of Waters and Don DeLillo's Falling Man . The Tiller of Waters (2001) explores the past recollections of its traumatized protagonist in the context of the Lebanese civil war. Barakat focuses on the narrator's present life in the devastated city of Beirut and his memories of his family and his ancestors. Falling Man (2007) examines the traumatic effects of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on a survivor who has lived through the attack and on his estranged wife and son. The novel takes its title from a photograph by Associated Press photographer Richard Drew that captured the falling body of a man jumping from a window of the south tower of the World Trade Center on the morning of the attacks. Both writers, in their respective ways, explore the fractured identity of the survivors as they attempt to use narrative to find a way to move on following the life-changing catastrophes they experienced. Barakat and DeLillo experiment with innovative modes of narration including shifting narrative positions, multiple focalization, fragmentation, and intertextual references. The novels foreground the important role of narration in transforming traumatic memory into narrative memory, thereby empowering victims and giving them agency.