Escaping Trauma thougth a Dreamworldfantasy and the Evasion of Pain in Jane Yolen's "Briar Rose" and John Boyne's "The boy in the Striped Pyjamas"

Abstract

Fiction has always been part of human beings, accompanying them even in the most difficult situations of life. In fact, certain victims of acute trauma may tend to mask and evade the pain they suffer by creating their own fictional world as a means of escaping from reality. This has become a recurrent theme In contemporary literature, as in the cases of Jane Yolen's Briar Rose and John Boyne's The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, whose characters would respectively block a traumatic memory by replacing it with a fantasy or stubbornly refuse to see the painful reality in front of their eyes choosing over it a less harsh fictional alternative. Through the analysis of these two books, this article will compare and contrast these two different ways to deny a traumatic reality and will highlight the necessity to recover those repressed memories not only to work through past traumas, but to give voice and pay homage to those overcome by them.