EFFECTS OF TRAUMA IN SHUTTER ISLAND

Abstract

It is very difficult to formulate and display the varied responses of the individual to a traumatic event, or a series of events at a particular time, place and cultural milieu. The prevalent view of literary studies claims that trauma stands outside representation altogether by highlighting an intrinsic epistemological fissure between traumatic experience and representation. This notion of trauma is not locatable in the simple violent or original event in an individual's past, and it returns to haunt the survivor later on. The movie "Shutter Island" based on the graphic novel by Dennis Lehane has the spellbinding story of mystery and paranoia of US Marshall Edward Daniels, a veteran soldier of the US Army, who with his partner Chuck Aule, investigates the disappearance of a patient who has apparently vanished from a locked room, in the Ashecliffe Hospital on an island and whose flashbacks in his mind go back and forth between his days of World War II in Germany and his wife who was killed in a fire two years ago. This article tries to probe traumatic experiences in and after the war and how frame of reference, self capacities, ego resources, cognitive schemas and memory have been affected.