"turn off' their psychological apparatus via practiced trance or dissociation. Thus, when

they ultimately achieve "self-removal" by massive denial, numbing, and dissociation,

they cannot recall the traumatic incidents or even if they can remember them; their

memory tends to consist of fragmentary bits or spots rather than a complete whole. 126 In

Morrison's novel, Pecola's frequent defensive mechanism of disappearance foreshadows

the tragic lot that will befall her after the rape by her father. When she collapses later

under the strain of unbearable shame, betrayal, and rejection, her defensively altered

psychic state finally takes over her life, making her completely split and dissociate herself

from the traumatic event and inducing a serious posttraumatic stress disorder that pushes

her beyond the limit of sanity. After the rape, the area of her self that she can own and

acknowledge without shame is diminished to such an extent that she finally, to borrow

Terr's expression, "steps aside" from her own self, entering into a state of nonbeing.

 While Pecola responds to a series of excruciating shaming incidents by taking all

the blame and hiding behind the mask of invisibility, Cholly reacts to the hostile forces

that expose his inadequacy by "acting out." Living in a chronic state of debasement and

humiliated fury, he violently directs his frustration and sense of deprivation outward.

Abandoned on a junk heap by his mother when he was only four days old, and rejected

by his own father, who does not even recognize him, he becomes a social pariah or

deviant. From the moment Cholly is first introduced in the novel, his violence portrays

him in a subhuman, derogatory way, because he has already "catapulted himself beyond

the reaches of human consideration" and "joined the animals" as "an old dog, a snake, a

ratty nigger"(18). His ravaging, violent acts run the gamut from burning down his house

and beating his wife to killing white men and even raping his own daughter. As if to