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The paper critiques Rahimi’s novel with reference to the representation of the traumatic experiences of the protagonist. Conversing with relevant postulates of trauma theory, the researchers have identified different dimensions of the excruciating encounters and, also, their ramifications. With the purpose to look for traces of both collective and individual trauma in the novel, the article negotiates the portrayal of the female character to expose multiple layers of the agony triggered by the sense of being victimized unjustly. The mere depiction of trauma is the problem with most literary narratives without shedding light on the healing process, despite the fact that theorists have engaged with the possible solutions for overcoming trauma. However, this novel is an exception that is why the recuperative aspect has been specifically focused. The analysis suggests that the novel is an attempt to give voice to the unspeakable, narrating the traumatic history, with the help of fiction because, in the Freudian idiom, telling a story is a ‘talking cure’ which helps in the healing process. Moreover, the act of narrating the traumatic history of a nation also proves to be palliative for the collective consciousness.

The article explicates the polemical schema of the novels produced by the British and the Indian writers apropos the historical event of the anticolonial rebellion/ revolution (1857). Grounded in the idea of creating a dialogue between the colonial and counter discursive texts, the research invokes Richard Lane’s bidirectional approach to explain how conflictual political visions trigger the skewed versions of the great defiance. The novelists of both nations have produced prolific fictional yields to represent the epic event. However, keeping in mind the scope of the study, the researchers have delimited their focus upon two of the representative novels, one for each nation: Louis Tracy’s The Red Year: A Story of the Indian Mutiny (1907) for the English version and Basavaraj Naikar’s The Sun behind the Cloud (2001) for the Indian one. Each of the novels voices the sloganized rhetoric of the respective nation while narrating the colossal clash, that is, Tracy portrays the mutiny as nefarious recalcitrance of the Indian rebels to disrupt the civilizational program and Naikar presents it as an auspicious act of defiance against the exploitative encroachment of the usurpers. A comparison has been drawn between the ideology-ridden discursive patterns of both the belligerent narratives and an intriguing concatenation of the diametric contrasts has been identified. The essential argument of the article is entrenched in the postcolonial and the new historicist notions vis-à-vis the chequered nature of the textual narratives and politicized parlance of the discursive records of the historical happenings.

The paper examines Eggers’ What is the What (2006) that has problematically been called an autobiographical novel and memoire, narrating Valentino’s chequered past as one of Sudanese Lost Boys. The text yields potential perspectives that demand scrutiny for understanding of the fascinating reciprocity between fictionality and historicity. The article engages theorizations of the complex coalescence offered by Zohar (1980) and McHale (1987) to benchmark the thematic dimensions of the selected text against the cutting-edge postulates. In addition, Valentino’s preface to the “novel”, engaging with the purpose of his collaborative working with Eggers, and Eggers’ essay “It was just boys walking” (2004), negotiating the genesis of the project, have also been used as a methodological touchstone. The analysis vindicates the correspondence between the fictional and the historical versions, albeit the author has fictionalized gaps of Valentino’s historicized life. Thus, Eggers’ text consummates blurring by encompassing both the thematic dimensions, fusing fiction and fact, and the structural schemas, mixing the techniques of different genre traditions, inasmuch as his work exhibits a hermeneutic playfulness found at the heart of the aesthetics of postmodern and 9/11 fiction.