Growing up in Colombia in the town of Aracataca, Gabriel García Márquez was raised with his grandparents who narrated him many stories about past violence including the Banana Massacre of 1928, the Thousand Days' War and the ghosts of colonial rulers. Being a descendant of a civil war veteran, Colonel Nicolas Marquez as well as García Márquez had personal examples of what Marianne Hirsch calls post memory. According to Hirsch (2008): 

Postmemory describes the relationship that the generation after those who witnessed cultural or collective trauma bears to the experiences of those who came before, experiences that they ‘remember' only by means of the stories, images, and behaviors among which they grew up. But these experiences were transmitted to them so deeply and affectively as to seem to constitute memories in their own right. (p. 106). Although he did not have any firsthand experiences of this trauma, the way in which these stories were transmitted and the emotional toll they had on the people who experienced them created their own memories for García Márquez. His anxieties were expressed throughout One Hundred Years of Solitude, and in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech he stated “The interpretation of our reality through patterns not our own serves only to make us ever more unknown, ever less free, ever more solitary” (García Márquez, 1982, para 7; Akter et al., 2019). This statement illustrates that he was very aware of the traumatic legacy of Latin America. Even though One Hundred Years of Solitude is not an autobiographical novel, García Márquez's theories about psychological trauma, collective denial and the repetition of history are incorporated into the characters of the Buendia family. However, as Terry Eagleton, (2008) in Literary Theory: An Introduction warns, “Psychoanalysing the author is a speculative business, and runs into just the same kind of problems we examined when discussing the relevance of authorial ‘intention' to works of literature” (p. 155). Regardless of García Márquez's intended purpose, he transcends through the act of writing.

The way García Márquez writes, especially through the nonlinear narrative structure with repeated names/characters, multiple flashbacks and foresha-dowing; captures many different layers of trauma and its impacts over multiple generations. Furthermore, he contextualizes his thematic material by using different historical occurrences (the Colombian civil wars, the Thousand Days' War, the Banana Massacre of 1928, the colonial conquest etc.) to show that trauma not only affects how we perceive reality, but it is also passed down to generation after generation rather than affecting just one individual's psyche.

Theoretical Framework

Originally, the term “trauma” is applied solely to the description of a physical injury; although later it is “extended to include psychogenic ailments” (Young, 1997, p. 6). The Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary defines trauma as “a mental condition caused by severe shock, especially when the harmful effects last for a long time” and as “unpleasant experiences that make you feel upset and/or anxious” (Hornby et al., 2010, "trauma" entry). Therefore, trauma includes both a psychological condition and long-term psychological effects. The definition of trauma can also be demonstrated to relate to both the psyche and physiology. Cathy Caruth's works have examined trauma in greater depth, particularly from the discipline of literary theory, and have made critical contributions to the understanding of trauma. Cathy Caruth greatly contributed to the popularity of trauma theory with her publication, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History, where she provided context for the way trauma is understood when interpreting many of the first texts in the first wave of trauma studies that will later be known as the ‘traditional model of trauma theory'. Along with Caruth, some first wave trauma critics (e.g., Shoshana Felman and Geoffrey Hartman) also make use of the writings of Sigmund Freud, Josef Breuer, and Jacques Lacan.

The foundation of the emergence of trauma studies is highly connected to Sigmund Freud. According to Balaev, (2018) some components of Freud's theories such as traumatic experiences “divide the psyche”, “influence memory differently than other experiences”, and cannot be recalled without a “narrative reproduction of the past” serve as the founding principles of trauma studies (p. 367). The foundation for this belief can also be attributed to Freud's belief that traumatic experiences would cause a significant change in both the memory and the identity of the individual experiencing the traumatic event. Therefore, first wave scholars within the field of trauma studies established that “trauma is an unassimilated event that shatters identity and remains outside normal memory and narrative representation” (Balaev, 2018, p. 363). Many of the first wave trauma studies' scholars, including Strachey as the translator of Freud and Breuer, considered traumatic experiences as pathog-enic and disruptive in nature which result in patho-logic symptoms that are caused by the memory. 

Lacan's interpretation of Freud was through a lens of poststructuralism, positing that “we can never mean precisely what we say and never say precisely what we mean” (Eagleton, 2008, p. 146). Lacan's understanding of the inherent chaos and self-referential nature of language provides a base for the theoretical model. The primary focus of traditional models of trauma are concerned with tracing the fragmentation of conscious thought in relation to the inability of characters to articulate their traumatic experiences due to the limits of language when attempted to be expressed through a literary text. By also considering the ways in which trauma can create what Van der Kolk et al. (1996) refer to as a “speechless terror” (p. 193), these models are able to explore how such an experience represents a form of universal response to traumatic events as they cannot be coded linguistically, since they have been repressed and are inherently inaccessible to individuals. Further, in “A Double Wound” of Caruth, this theory positions meaning or attempts to represent such experiences will be deferred and “not locatable in the simple violent or original event in the individual's past” but can only be identified in “the way it is precisely not known” but return “to haunt the survivor later on” (Uddin, 2026; Caruth, 1996, p. 10).

Basically, according to traditional trauma studies, traumas create dissociation or ego splitting, changing how people remember and experience identity and causing the individual to lose their sense of self, of the world around them and how they emotionally organize. In addition, Caruth (1996) argues that the effects of trauma are not limited to the individual psyche but are also passed on through subsequent generations, and trauma has inherently cross-generational / trans-historical characteristics. She states: “History, like trauma, is never simply one's own, that history is precisely the way we were implicated in each other's traumas” (p. 32). Therefore, she expands our understanding of representations of trauma in a work of literature. While Caruth recognizes the generational aspects of trauma, her emphasis remains with trauma's ineffectiveness. Later, using Caruth's theory as inspiration, an inclusive trauma theory model, known as the pluralistic trauma theory model, has been developed which combines various theoretical frameworks addressing issues of race, post-colonialism, feminism, and ecocriticism. In this model, theorists testify that Caruth's conceptuali-zation of trauma through literature is only one potential model for related conceptions of trauma; there are other possible models as well. The pluralistic trauma theory model goes on to contend that “traumatic experience uncovers new relation-ships between experience, language, and knowledge that detail the social significance of trauma” instead of being limited to psycho pathological fragment-ation (Balaev, 2018, p. 366). In other words, the scholars of pluralistic model of trauma studies believe in the variability of the causes, effects and potentiality/possibilities of representation. Thus, trauma is not only limited to its inherent ineffability because of its psycho pathological functions rather it is, as argued by psychiatrist Kirmayer (1996), “governed by social contexts and cultural models for memories, narratives, and life stories” (p. 27).

Balaev, (2018) cites a pluralistic model to argue that traumatic experiences “may include an ambiguous referentiality as well as determinate meaning” and further that this model defines memory not as a solidified chamber of ice but rather a reconstruction occurring in the act of recollecting (p. 366). The manner in which this reconstruction of memory is completed is affected by “cultural and historical contexts that impact narrative recall and create knowledge of the past” (Balaev, 2018, p. 367). In Against the Unspeakable: Complicity, the Holocaust, and Slavery in America, Mandel (2006) argues that the traditional concept of trauma as unspeakable is a “discursive production” that evades moral responsibility in representing atrocity by privileging the “problems inherent in speech” rather than addressing the “ethical obligations involved in such representations (pp. 4-5). Furthermore, Forter (2014) suggests in a similar manner that “The ‘unrepre-sentable' character of trauma is thus due not to its being ‘originary' and hence, beyond history and representation. Rather, it has to do with the enforced rupture with precolonial pasts and the prohibitions against remembrance enforced by particular regimes of power” (p. 77).

Trauma of War and Colonial Violence in One Hundred Years of Solitude

From the theoretical basis of the trauma study, we can see that trauma studies investigates how traumatic experiences are represented and how traumatic experiences affect an individual or community's view of the world and themselves; as well as how trauma can be transmitted through the social, cultural, and political spheres. Wright, (2021) wrote in his essay “Lacan on Trauma and Causality: A Psychoanalytic Critique of Post-Traumatic Stress/Growth”, “trauma tears a hole in the very fabric of meaning” (p. 7). That is, trauma results in a lack of direction, dislocation from one's body and disorientation in the way someone thinks about themselves and others. In Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude we see characters who have been impacted by trauma, and they exhibit all of the symptoms of a traumatic response. Most have the hallmarks of a trauma response based on the fact that they were impacted by years of trauma, such as war, displacement from one's home, violence of the state, incestuous desire, and the weight of prophecy. Aureliano Buendía and José Arcadio Segundo are two of the characters in the novel who experience the impact of trauma in a major way, as they both saw and survived extreme acts of violence, with the former witnessing thirty-two wars and the later witnessing the Banana Massacre. Both characters experience physical trauma as the result of this violence, which leaves them affected for the rest of their lives. The story of Colonel Aureliano Buendía gives us an insight into the ways in which a traumatic experience can affect an individual's life. As an example, Colonel Aureliano Buendía experiences psychological trauma from witnessing the violence that he experienced during combat; being shot, witnessing his fellow soldiers killed; and being a witness to the horror of combat. The author takes a single, almost deadpan paragraph to provide the cumulative experience of his trauma:

He had had seventeen male children by seventeen different women, and they were killed one after another on a single night before the oldest had reached the age of thirty-five. He had escaped fourteen attempts on his life, seventy-three ambushes, and a firing squad. He had survived a dose of strychnine in his coffee that was enough to kill a horse. (García Márquez, 1970, p. 95)

Without an emotional lens through which to view this poignant representation of a painful history, the character's flat affect in the description is an example of dissociation, which is often seen as a marker of trauma. The memory of the Colonel's seventeen sons being killed on one night is not described as a single narrative by the Colonel; instead, it is described by pieces and, therefore, provides evidence to support that though an incident has provided significant trauma, it remains a repressed memory for both the character and for the narrative as a whole. The passage also suggests that both the trauma's inability to manifest itself in a coherent, singular fashion represents an unconscious deployment of psychological dissociation, as well as the effect trauma has had on a witness' mind. The Colonel suffers physical trauma too, being shot, poisoned and almost executed on numerous occasions, which disrupts his identity. Thus, we see the immediate effects of the traumatic event on the Colonel. He begins to make and remake small gold fish in his workshop to help him heal his split identity, caused by trauma from multiple violent events and the failure to retrieve his power. He refuses to engage in politics, withdraws from his family, and orders the firing squad to delay their firing until his friend Gerineldo Márquez arrives to be executed. When experiencing unresolved trauma, he creates an identity crisis, stating, “The secret of a good old age is simply an honorable pact with solitude” (García Márquez, 1970, p. 175). He knows he is not the pure revolutionary ideal, which was achieved through his violent actions. Therefore, he has created a hybrid of idealism and barbarism due to his trauma and is left with an identity crisis.

With José Arcadio Segundo, he is one of the workers on strike when the Banana Massacre occurs, and the narrator describes this event very graphically:

When José Arcadio Segundo came to he was lying face up in the darkness. He realized that he was riding on an endless and silent train and that his head was caked with dry blood... There was no free space in the car except for an aisle in the middle... he saw the man corpses, woman corpses, child corpses who would be thrown into the sea like rejected bananas. (García Márquez, 1970, p. 262)

José Arcadio Segundo's experience in the boxcar is an unusual instance of trauma. The narrator describes it, “It's coming... Something frightful, like a kitchen dragging a village behind it” (García Márquez, 1970, p. 192). The violence of the dead is outside of him and is at the same time horrifying for him and somehow removed from him, a feature of dissociative trauma. After escaping, he has spent the rest of his life holed up in the room of Melquíades, unable to articulate what he saw and repeating only “There must have been three thousand of them”, while the government actors and townspeople have denied that the event ever happened (García Márquez, 1970, p. 263).

These events will shape the rest of the lives of the characters. The Colonel loses his sense of self and self-worth as a result of being a crippled old man who has an inferiority complex because he has participated in wars which have changed nothing. His disillusionment with liberal politics and the betrayal of revolutionary ideas also leads him to retreat into solitude. Coincidentally, José Arcadio Segundo's experience of trauma during the massacre causes him to develop inertia, a psychological disorientation, and a sense of aimlessness. Despite being a Buendía, he acquires a mixed identity as the only remaining survivor of the massacre. His obsessive reading of Melquíades' writings could be interpreted as an attempt to cope with his trauma. Accordingly, he is marginalized within his family, which is a family that denies the massacre.

In essence, each of the two men will develop certain behaviors or habits in life which can be charac-terized as either war neuroses or the result of the effects of their respective wars. For instance, Colonel Aureliano Buendía engages in a compulsive ritual of creating goldfish, which both create and destroy, and represent life and death respectively. He does this as an attempt to “certify” his identity, by failing to have any sense of self-worth. Even though the goldfish are beautiful, the habit of creating a goldfish, melting it then recreating it will not allow him to progress in life. This behavior is the same thing as Freud's concept of the “repetition compulsion” (Freud, 2010, p. xiv). 

Personal, Social and Cultural Trauma: The Insomnia Plague and Collective Amnesia

The intersection between the individual/society and personal/cultural trauma creates an interconnected network of trauma experiences that impact the characters' identity, worldview, sense of dislocation, feelings of dissociation, etc.; almost all of the characters have been subjected to colonial rule and were survivors of some degree of internal colonialism, which is why they show a history of experiencing trauma due to the colonial legacy of both economic displacement (banana companies) and political repression (dictatorships). For this reason, “the dilemma of One Hundred Years of Solitude's characters is related to their lives trapped between different temporalities: cyclical indigenous time and linear colonial time” (Kong, 2008). To communicate such complex issues, the narrative of One Hundred Years of Solitude is non-linear; it has multiple perspectives, jumps from character to character and time period to time period. In addition, using flashbacks and foreshadowing, the third person omniscient narrator presents the complexities of the characters' lives. Thus, through these various strategies employed by the author, the disjointed and fragmented memories of the characters are captured, along with the long-term emotional consequences of those memories, the intrusion/recurrent nature of those memories and the psychological disorientation that derives from these experiences.

Macondo experiences an intense insomnia epidemic in the early stages of the novel and this can be interpreted as a strong representation of “falling away from traumatic experience”. The cause of this epidemic is Rebeca, a little orphaned girl who arrives at Macondo with the bones of her parents in a bag. The growth of knowing what has been forgotten is what the narrator describes as expanding. The narrator describes: “José Arcadio Buendía put it into practice all through the house... With an inked brush he marked everything with its name” (García Márquez, 1970, p. 48). The expanding knowledge of the way in which the sleeper sleeps on it conti-nuously shows the effects of trauma displacement on the way in which one experiences the present moment and not being able to integrate the traumatic experience into the larger story. As Caruth, (1995) writes “to be traumatized is precisely to be possessed by an image or event” (pp. 4-5). The villagers are in a state of permanent amnesia as a result of being displaced and the experience of being displaced from themselves, which has resulted in the creation of a new identity. The creation of an identity is the act of experiencing and creating that generates new experiences; and as the villagers create a new identity based on the new events that have occurred in the village. They will continue to live as if these events have not occurred and will continue to forget and not be able to remember. The insomnia epidemic represents the event of being possessed by a given experience and therefore being unable to sleep; this being unable to sleep is being unable to escape the traumatic experience, and being able to remember; and therefore, the event(s) represented by this experience(s) are ultimately not being able to create/create and create. 

Likewise, the traumatic impact on society due to the government's refusal to take responsibility for the events around the Banana Massacre are communi-cated through generations of survivors. The state claims, “Nothing has happened in Macondo, nothing has ever happened, and nothing ever will happen. This is a happy town” (García Márquez, 1970, p. 265).  The enforced amnesia experienced by a nation following this event is symptomatic of the collective trauma of their citizens. The children born in the wake of the massacre will know that something terrible has occurred but cannot name what happened; hence Marianne Hirsch defines this as “postmemory”. “Postmemory describes the relationship of the second generation to powerful, often traumatic, experiences that preceded their births but that were nevertheless transmitted to them so deeply as to seem to constitute memories in their own right” (Hirsch, 2008, p. 103). The fourth and fifth generations of Buendía family members continue to carry the effects of the massacre without being aware of it through melancholia, repeating the Colonel's wars on a smaller scale, and lack of ability to develop stable relationships with individuals — these are classic indicators of trauma transmitted through multiple generations. Rebeca carries both evidence of her individual trauma as well as generational trauma. She arrives in Macondo with “Her entire baggage consisted of a small trunk, a little rocking chair with small hand-painted flowers, and a canvas sack which kept making a cloc-cloc-cloc sound, where she carried her parents' bones” (García Márquez, 1970, p. 42). She develops a compulsive urge to eat dirt and whitewash. According to the author:

She went back to eating earth. The first time she did it almost out of curiosity, sure that the bad taste would be the best cure for the temptation. And, in fact, she could not bear the earth in her mouth. But she persevered, overcome by the growing anxiety, and little by little she was getting back her ancestral appetite, the taste of primary minerals, the unbridled satisfaction of what was the original food. (García Márquez, 1970, p. 62)

This oral fixation is an example of trauma response - physically trying to fill an emotional void. Rebeca's trauma impacts the dynamic between her adopted family and her brothers, leading to her life-long seclusion in a decaying home. By the end of her life, she is contained in a home with one wall entirely black - a powerful image of melancholia. As Dominick LaCapra, (2001) distinguishes, Rebeca “is acted out or compulsively repeated” by her trauma rather than achieving “critical distance, and perspective” - she repeats the original loss through compulsive rituals and self-imprisonment (p. 90). She experiences recurring loss in rituals of compulsively performing acts of self-imprisonment. Another aspect of her trauma is the incestuous desire for her as both a literal and figurative repetition. The Buendía family experiences the effect of a prophecy - that their family line will cease when the last grandson is born with the tail of a pig. As the last grandson, Aureliano, is actually born with a pig tail, the prophecy becomes true at the end of the novel. Yet another way of describing the same thing happened with Aureliano when the narrator tells the reader: “for he was the only one in a century who had been engendered with love” (García Márquez, 1970, p. 348). However, it is an incestuous love and his body has been consumed by ants. As noted in one psychoanalytic interpretation, “the history of the family was a machine with unavoidable repetitions” (García Márquez, 1970, p. 336).

Fragmentation, Narrative Temporality, and the Manuscripts as Trauma Archive

The way that One Hundred Years of Solitude tells its story is a large part of its trauma. One Hundred Years of Solitude starts unexpectedly in the middle of the action – Colonel Aureliano Buendía is about to be shot by a firing squad and remembers back to the day when he went with his dad to see ice. The author moves back and forth and flips between times (the past, present, and future) without notice. This shifting time frame simulates how traumatic memories work. Caruth argues that memories are not stored in the order that they occurred and instead are recalled and replayed in sporadic interruptions. The first sentence of One Hundred Years of Solitude is the best example of this impinging upon the character as well as the reader: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice” (García Márquez, 1970, p. 9). The future (the event of the firing squad) will have already occurred at some distant point in the past (the memory of ice) – this temporal compression is a classic example of how traumatic experiences are rendered. The author repeats this throughout the novel: “Macondo had been a prosperous place and well on its way until it was disordered and corrupted and suppressed by the banana company, whose engineers brought on the deluge as a pretext to avoid promises made to the workers” (García Márquez, 1970, p. 297). The use of narrative foreclosure (the reader has already read the reason for the destruction), like the sense of inevitability in a survivor of a traumatic event: survivors know what happened, but do not know how to prevent it.

Melquíades' manuscripts, written in Sanskrit, serve as the master trope for all traumatic narrative in this novel. These manuscripts will remain undeciphered for over 100 years; the final Aureliano, the last Buendía, will be the first to decipher them in the final moment of the novel. When he deciphers the manuscripts, he discovers that what he has just experienced in his lifetime is the same as what has been written (and this discovery is the final moment of the novel). The narrator concludes: “and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth” (García Márquez, 1970, p. 353).

The unveiling creates a mise en abyme that embodies Caruth's concept of belatedness (Nachträglichkeit). The traumatic event (the family's entire past) becomes “available” only at the time of its destruction - too late for any change to have happened. The manuscripts are described by González Echevarria as a “totalizing-and-fossilizing site,” but they also remain “untotalizable” (Kong, 2008). They serve as the repository of the unconscious, holding the repressed truth regarding the family's trauma, and can only be accessed at a moment of terminal illumination. As a critic observes, “Melquíades' parchments expose the inherently paradoxical structure of the archive – a totalizing and fossilizing site hoarding liberating, non-originating and unlocalizable manuscripts” (Kong, 2008). Additionally, since the manuscripts were composed in a tongue that needs translation, that adds to the problems associated with the representation of trauma. At the very least they are without translation until the absolute conclusion, while their translation occurs concurrently with the destruction of Macondo. This indicates that the totality of access to traumatic memory corresponds to death.

Transgenerational Transmission: Acting Out and Working Through

The family history of the Buendía clan illustrates what LaCapra calls “acting out” as opposed to “working through trauma”. They demonstrate this through their inability to gain enough critical distance from the prior generation's repeated issues. The stories retold around the table by each generation pick up where the previous one left off with its own unresolved conflicts. For example: the Colonel's eleven sons were named after him (Aureliano), and he experienced significant repression due to an unresolved political trauma he experienced at the time of their birth – resulting in each of these son's being assassinated in a horrible fashion soon after they were born. The narrator states:

A few months after the return of Aureliano José, an exuberant woman perfumed with jasmine appeared at the house with a boy of five. She stated that he was the son of Colonel Aureliano Buendía... They christened him Aureliano... During the course of that week, at different places along the coast, his seventeen sons were hunted down like rabbits. (García Márquez, 1970, p. 134)

The rapid, deadpan manner of listing the deaths signifies the dissociative impact of trauma; the emotional response is dulled because the experience is beyond comprehension. This is not a failure of the author; rather, it is a formal success in depicting something that cannot be expressed. As Caruth, (1996) explains, “trauma is not locatable in the simple violent or original event in an individual's past, but rather in the way that its very unassimilated nature - the way it was precisely not known in the first instance - returns to haunt the survivor later on” (p. 10). One character that appears for a brief moment to escape this cycle is Remedios the Beauty, who is taken to heaven. However, this form of escaping is magical and does not exist in reality. Remedios can be viewed as a married representation of dissociation: she leaves her body literally because she cannot endure being in it. Other characters that are close to conquering their traumatic experiences (e.g., Ursula, who lives for over a century and sees the entire family dynamic) do not have the power to change them. In fact, Ursula's last words are a commentary to the repeated cycles; “the history of the family was a machine with unavoidable repetitions, a turning wheel that would have gone on spilling into eternity were it not for the progressive and irremediable wearing of the axle” (García Márquez, 1970, p. 336; Yerbolkyzy, 2026). While Ursula's insight is an avenue to working through her trauma, it is too late for her; she dies without having had the opportunity to transfer this knowledge.

The manuscripts foretold the destruction of Macondo and this destruction was, therefore the final act of this entire scenario. The hurricane would destroy the land of Macondo so that it was gone from planet Earth completely. This conclusion to the story has sometimes been viewed pessimistically, as indicating that there is no chance of working through the trauma of colonialism/postcolonialism. How, then, can we understand that the entire novel, including the act of telling the story itself, is an attempt at working through (the historical trauma) from a Caruthian perspective, García Márquez creates a “talking cure” where he gives form to repetition, fragmentation, and silence (in each of these kinds of repetitions) and allows readers to view the return of the repressed (the trauma) and bear witness to the unclaimed history that exists. According to Caruth (1996): “The story of trauma, then, as the narrative of a belated experience, far from telling of an escape from reality - the escape from a death, or from its referential force—rather attests to its endless impact on a life” (p. 14). Therefore, there is continuity of the work after the “death” of the myth of Macondo.

Gabriel García Márquez's narrative and characterization methods in One Hundred Years of Solitude present an alternative way for readers to understand the detrimental effects of war, colonialism, state terrorism, and the impossibility of acquiring traumatic history through a linear, progressive narrative. His writing depicts how these types of traumata affect subsequent generations of individuals and disrupt their sense of belonging, identity, cultural values, religious beliefs, and historical understanding. Through this depiction, García Márquez uncovers the complexities of personal, social, cultural, and transgenerational trauma experienced by the Buendía family. He illustrates how different forms of trauma influence each other across time and generations and how individuals transfer trauma to other individuals and generations. Although traumatic experiences exist at an unconscious level and the widespread impacts of trauma challenge the limits of language, the author possesses a unique voice for representing these experiences through the use of fragmentation, repetition, magical realism, and the manuscript that can only be read at the time of destruction. Ultimately, the novel functions as a trauma narrative – one that effectively responds to the respective causes and consequences of both visible and invisible trauma to the lives of the characters – while still operating within the limits of language (indeed, growing those limits through the tools of magical realism).

M.S.H.: Conceptualization, Methodology, Formal Analysis, Writing – Original Draft, Writing – Review & Editing. M.A.K.: Literature Review, Validation of Theoretical Framework, Resources, Writing – Review & Editing, Supervision.