In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

213 Death by Drowning Trauma Theory and Islands in the Stream kim moreland Islands in the Stream has attracted relatively little attention from readers and critics, in part because of its posthumous publication and vexed composition history.1 But such explanations do not hold up for A Moveable Feast, embraced by readers and critics alike, and The Garden of Eden, which has garnered great critical attention and even encouraged a reinterpretation of the Hemingway canon. Islands’ relative lack of popularity thus requires additional explanation. The unsympathetic nature of the novel’s protagonist, Thomas Hudson, may help in this regard. He is a hard man to like, and we cannot escape him in this novel, which focuses almost exclusively on his actions and thoughts. We not only observe him from the outside but also are almost claustrophobically located within his thoughts. He is the novel’s Jamesian center of consciousness, and we are granted extraordinary access to his interiority. His unsympathetic nature therefore colors our reading experience. Moreover, as the novel progresses , he grows not more but less sympathetic, and so we experience not relief but an increase in the tension of dislike. We grow increasingly uncomfortable as we follow—indeed, intimately accompany—Hudson on his journey through the novel, which ends not with a catharsis but with a dying fall. Reading Islands is a depressing and enervating experience not redeemed by sympathy, which helps to explain why neither readers nor critics have embraced the novel. However, if we read Islands in the Stream through the lens of trauma theory, our experience of Thomas Hudson will change. Islands is a narrative of profound loss marked by uncanny repetition. Though Hudson is unable to integrate his traumatic past into his present and thereby afford himself a future, trauma theory will enable us to understand and sympathize with him rather than rejecting him in distaste. 214 Kim Moreland In Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, Cathy Caruth asserts that “trauma describes an overwhelming experience of sudden or catastrophic events in which the response to the event occurs in the often delayed, uncontrolled repetitive appearance of . . . intrusive phenomena” (11). Noting that Freud “describes a pattern of suffering that is inexplicably persistent in the lives of certain individuals,” she adds that he “wonders at the peculiar and sometimes uncanny way in which catastrophic events seem to repeat themselves for those who have passed through them” (1). In her discussion of Freud, she further notes that “these repetitions are particularly striking because they seem not to be initiated by the individual’s own acts but rather appear as the possession of some people by a sort of fate, a series of painful events to which they are subjected, and which seem to be entirely outside their wish or control,” such that “the experience of a trauma repeats itself, exactly and unremittingly, through the unknowing acts of the survivor and against his very will” (2). Hudson’s traumatic experiences are prominent in the novel, as are the uncanny repetitions he experiences. He has two failed marriages, and he obsesses about the failure of his first marriage and about his first wife, whom he wishes he had never left and who makes an unlikely appearance in the second section of the novel. He subsequently marries a third time during the course of the novel— in fact, in the white space between the first and second sections of the novel (“Bimini” and “Cuba,” respectively), which encompasses the passage of about seven years—but this marriage too is unhappy, and he and his third wife are estranged. She is only an absent presence in the novel, nameless, never actually appearing except in his thoughts and, very occasionally, his conversation. His two younger sons—David and Andrew—are killed in an automobile accident in France with their mother, as Hudson learns via telegram at the end of the first section—and these deaths gain resonance from the focus of the first section on Hudson’s holiday with the boys at his home in Bimini. His oldest son, young Tom, who shared the holiday with his half-brothers, is killed in action during World War II, his plane shot down over the English Channel by a flak ship, again during the white space between the first and second sections; we learn this only in the second section—and indeed, not until halfway through this section does Hudson mention young Tom’s death. Hudson himself is mortally wounded in the third section (“At...

Share