Returning from the Heartland: Geopolitics and Veterans' Trauma in William Kowalski's The Hundred Hearts (2013)

Trauma as a literary field, has gained much critical attention since World War I. Starting with the Vietnam war, many cases of American war survivors are diagnosed as suffering from psychological trauma; technically known as posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). This paper is a study of psychological trauma in William Kowalski's novel The Hundred Hearts which. presents an image of America at its worst; a new imperialist, hardened heart America who sacrifices hundreds of its soldiers' hearts for no good reason other than its inner cruelty, perpetual aggressiveness and global violence. The focus is on the effect of US atrocious war behaviour and geopolitical violence in foreign territories on young American veterans who are sent across US borders to collectively fight futile wars and have returned within US borders to lonely fight PTSD. 
Existing critical discourse on trauma literature stems from Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytical theories which view the traumatic experience as static and embedded in a deep, lost past. Contrary to this discourse, this paper uses a new approach of the literary trauma theory which views the traumatic experience as lively and active. Crossing the traditional borders of literary trauma theory into a new trauma concept helps understand Kowalski's novel. Kowalski offers his view of this new notion of trauma in which memory of past traumatic experience does not produce a repetitive closed pattern of repressed knowledge, as in old trauma notion, but produces an understanding of it and an attempt at healing it within the existing social and cultural reality. (250 words)