In Search of Flat Depth: Minor Character and the Trauma Plot

This paper theorizes a contemporary subgenre, the "antitrauma trauma novel," suggesting these texts raise questions about the tendency to explain character with reference to a traumatic backstory, even as they nonetheless struggle to move beyond this formulation. Taking Ottessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation as exemplary, I draw on disability studies to argue that the novel's two lead characters both wield trauma as "narrative prosthesis" to (mis)read one another. As the protagonist-narrator deploys this inappropriate hermeneutic, she incorporates formal features associated with traumatic subjectivity; nonetheless, rather than generate psychological realism, they produce a paradoxically flat character depth.