CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
1.1 Background of the Study
Literature is a kind of art arising out of the human ability to create languages. Literature is one of human creation, as a written text based on the fact. This is implied that literature comes from reality. Literature is a medium of cultural society which has the destiny of human life such as their problem, conflict, and struggle of life. It represents the story of reality in human thoughts, feeling, behavior, attitudes originality through the imagination and concrete situation. According to Griffith (1982:1) “Literature gives pleasure, it has a certain magic that transports us from the real world to seemingly more remote and enjoyable place.” People who read literature will get enjoyment because it gives information, knowledge, and experience about human daily life. In line with the statement above literature becomes a historical mentality of peculiar perspective. It also spreads out the philosophy, idea, memory, notion and point of view in cultural construction of reality. Thus literature is both presented and reported story as the skeleton of evidence from the author’s mind to the reader.
Literary works are written or created by writers not only to be read but there are also ideas, experiences, and message that writer wants to deliver for the readersso that the reader can take conclusions and interpret it as something that can be useful for the development of life. This thing proves that literary works can develop culture. In another words, literature is always related to social culture. It happens because the writer also undergoes the influence of the environment and his time in creating his works.
expression of feeling including experience, idea, motivation, confidence in the concrete description by using language.
Novel, the most widely read of the form of literature, might be defined as a prose fiction of book length which characters and actions are presented in a plot as if representing persons and events in real life. A novel expresses some aspect of human’s love and existence. Since novel talks about human activities and describes what happened in surrounding,it is written in long composition.
Sometimes from author’s experience, they got mixed feelings such as happiness, sadness even negative feeling like trauma. I chose to study about trauma for my thesis because it is interesting to see how literature and life can be related to each other.
Morrison’s Song of Solomon is a novel about traumatized people, victims of slavery, and the brutal history of the past, in which Morrison moves her readers throughout the non-linear memories of these traumatized characters. Since no narrative of trauma can be told in a linear way, Morrison tries to depict the overwhelming power of trauma through a non-linear narrative, episodic delivery and flashbacks. She has used modernist along with oral techniques to invoke the reader’s power of imagination, which implicitly depicts history not as a series of significant public events, but as rememory. Consequently, readers are compelled to confront and concoct the disjointed and fragmented pieces of memories, shifting narrative voices, and repetition, in which past, present, and future are intermingled.
and its place in a literary work, we are primarily studying the author’s imagination. As all literary works are based on some kind of experience and as all authors are human, we are necessarily caught up in the wide spectrum of emotional problems caused by experience.
In this novel, Morrison has illustrated the belated experience of trauma not only through main characters but also through her narrative, specifically in the beginning of each chapter. In the initial part of each chapter, the readers might find themselves one step behind the narrator, which resembles Freud’s definition of the incubation period in a traumatic experience. Morrison’s narrative clearly depicts the belated experience of trauma by putting readers in an untimelessness as if the readers get lost in the character’s traumatic memories, and even the story’s traumatic past. Morrison has implicitly conveyed the sense of belatedness in Song of Solomon. These are those gaps and black holes which are rooted in some traumatic and murky experiences in the past, into which Morrison submerges her readers in order to convey the sense of the traumatic experiences.
Reading Song of Solomon is more than an intellectual experience. It appears to be a physical process in which the reader must take a participatory role to fill the traumatic gaps and to connect several seemingly unrelated details in order to solve the riddle of the text.
Finally, all of the explanations mentioned above become the reason to have this analysis entitled The Effects of Trauma Found in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon.
1.2 Problems of the Study
In doing research, it is very important to decide the problem so the readers can focus their mind. The problems of this study are:
1. How are traumas portrayedin Song of Solomon?
In line with the problems that the writer mentioned before, is meant to answer the questions. In other words, what the writer expects from her analysis are:
1. To find out traumas portrayed in Song of Solomon
2. To find out the effects of trauma experienced by the characters in Song of Solomon
1.4 Scope of the Study
To avoid the vagueness of analysis of this novel, the writer makes limitation in her analysis into a narrow scope so that the analysis can be clearly interpreted and understood. This thesis focuses on trauma and its effects such as fright, anxiety, shame, and physical pain. Therefore the writer limitsher analysis only to find out The Effects of Trauma in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon.
1.5 Significance of the Study
This thesis can enrich reader’s knowledge about literature studies, especially about what inside the novel. In this novel, we can see some effects of trauma as mentioned before which are fright, anxiety, shame and physical pain. Also this thesis can be an example how to deal with the traumas that happened in our life. And especially for the English Department students, they can learn to analyze about the traumas.
1.6 Review of Related Literature
In doing the analysis, the writer uses some books as sources which can help her to find out data and information. Some of the books are:
from the outcome of the conflict and from the support provided by tone, attitude, atmosphere, setting, and symbolism or allegory.
2. Theory of Literature by Rene Wellek and Austin Warren (1982). This book provides some explanations about extrinsic approach in general
3. Studies on Hysteria by Sigmund Freud and Joseph Breuer (1974). This book provides some explanations about the coreelation between psychoanalysis and trauma
4. Moses and Monotheism by Sigmund Freud (1939). This book provides some explanations about trauma and its structure.
