TY - THES ID - 136929005 TI - The Narrative Ethics of Great War Fiction. : An analysis of Pat Barker's Regeneration and Joseph Boyden's Three Day Road. AU - Joos, Amber AU - de Graef, Ortwin AU - KU Leuven. Faculteit Letteren. Opleiding Master of Western Literature PY - 2014 PB - Leuven : K.U. Leuven. Faculteit Letteren DB - UniCat UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:136929005 AB - For my analysis of Pat Barker's Regeneration and Joseph Boyden's Three Day Road, Adam Zachary Newton's Narrative Ethics has provided me with a useful instrument.The three categories of his triadic structure (narrational ethics, representational ethics and hermeneutic ethics) have allowed me to examine both authors' reflections on the representation of the unfathomable traumatic experience of World War I, as well as the importance both authors ascribe to the healing quality of the narrative act in processing trauma. Both Barker and Boyden question the validity of historical accounts. Their focus, however, is different. Whereas Barker is primarily concerned with the (im)possibility of regenerating the past (and by extension, historical figures), Boyden focuses on the facticity of history, which is a product of discourse, rather than its object. In their attempt to show readers what it might have been like, both authors explore the limits of the novel as a medium. Barker constructs a universe of meaning by letting different voices enter into dialogue. It is precisely this polyphonous nature of the novel that makes it a good medium to represent the past, which, like a literary text, is unfathomable. Boyden, on the other hand, reflects on his use of a Western medium to represent an aboriginal experience. He tries to represent the experiences of his Cree narrators as truthfully as possible. Therefore, he gives the novel a cyclical structure, because time for the Cree is cyclical and not linear, and makes ample use of the pathetic fallacy to illustrate his narrators' animistic worldview. Furthermore, both Barker and Boyden acknowledge the importance of the narrative act in the processing of trauma. Even though the past is ungraspable and therefore transcends our ability to put it into words, the narration of our traumatic experiences allows us to place them within the structural narrative of our history. Narrative is therapeutic not only for the individual characters wh... ER -