Literary Sphere

  Cathy Caruth - The Wound and the Voice: Analysis Cathy Caruth – “The Wound and the Voice” From Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (1996) 1. Trauma as a Paradoxical Event At the heart of Caruth’s essay is a central paradox: trauma is both a fully real experience and one that is not immediately comprehended . It is a wound to the psyche that occurs not only because of the violence or threat of death, but also because it is not assimilated when it happens. Trauma thus exists in a temporal delay —it is experienced too soon to be fully known and too late to be integrated in a conventional narrative of experience. Caruth draws heavily on Freud’s notion of Nachträglichkeit (deferred action), particularly from Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), where he observes that victims of traumatic events often do not suffer immediately, but only later, through symptoms like flashbacks, nightmares, or repetitive behavior. Caruth reinter...