narrative memory and making them "placed in their proper context and reconstructed into

neutral or meaningful narratives."148

 Once broken by a traumatic incident, the personal narrative of self is prone to

further disintegration unless some remedial efforts are made to put the incident into a

manageable perspective and counteract the repetition compulsion so that traumatized

people can reinvest in their life and restore, to a certain degree, the basic value and belief

system trauma has challenged. Moreover, as the self has been shaped in the relational

context, the restoration of the self in the wake of trauma also requires supportive,

empathic others who can sustain them through the difficult process of recovery and

healing. Or the "holding environment" and its nurturing functions are even more

important when the self disintegrates and its personal world shatters by traumatic

violence. Especially since trauma, as the psychologist Ronnie Janoff-Bulman argues,

radically destroys people's fundamental beliefs in the benevolence and meaningfulness of

the world, and the worthiness of the self,149 it is integral to have empathic others who can

listen to survivors' story to help them understand and come to terms with their experience

through narrativizing activities that ultimately establish some distance from the event and

make it less threatening to reflect upon. Narrative mediation is one major form of what

Dori Laub calls the "re-externalization" and "historicization" of the traumatic incident,

which is necessary for "undoing [survivors'] entrapment" in the troubling past.150

 In The Bluest Eye, the lack of empathic listeners and their supports ultimately

results in Pecola's final descent into madness and her subsequent creation of a dissociated

alter ego in the aftermath of her rape. The latter dramatically exemplifies the devastating

effect of her ultimate social castration that exacerbates the harm already done by Cholly's