fabric of their life narrative that hitherto consisted of closely interconnected episodes

endowed with personal meaning and ordered in a temporal sequence.

 Traumatic events are the incomprehensible, unsymbolisable real that disrupts the

personal narrative of self. Trauma as unassimilated, unsymbolized experiences haunts

survivors like the specters of those who have not been properly buried. Since traumatized

people cannot process their experiences cognitively, emotionally, and symbolically, their

story of trauma becomes, to use Maurice Blanchot's term, the "un-story"138 over which

they have no conscious control. This brings to the fore a highly complicated issue of

traumatic memory and its connection to other symptoms of trauma, such as dissociation,

psychic numbing, and psychic splitting that explain the considerable constriction and

diminution of the self in the wake of trauma. The psychiatrist Henry Krystal sums up this

phenomenon as the "post-traumatic depletion of the consciously recognized spheres of

selfhood" and explains it as the hallmark of post-traumatic stress disorder: "Thus, the

post-traumatic state is characterized by an impoverishment of the areas of one's mind to

which the 'I' feeling of self-sameness is extended, and a hypertrophy of the 'not-I'

alienated areas." 139 All these issues converge and are vividly dramatized in one scene in

The Bluest Eye that describes Cholly's rape of Pecola.

 What triggers the inhuman depravity from Cholly is a series of painful incidents in

his traumatic past that somehow get transposed to his present, blurring the boundaries

between different time frames and the separate identities of others in his mind. Especially

his encounter with armed white men during his first sexual adventure deeply humiliates

him, and memories of the incident hauntingly return with a forceful power when he

experiences toward Pecola similarly intermingled emotions he once felt toward another