| abstract |
The Responsible Party is a novella about three siblings navigating childhood and ongoing trauma induced by their physically and emotionally abusive father. The story is told in the first person, with the narrative voice alternating from chapter to chapter between the three adult siblings. After the suicides of their grandmother and aunt, Yasemin, Sena, and Aydin become estranged from their father. When the eldest sibling receives a phone call regarding the disappearance of their father from his home in Bodrum, Turkey, the novel goes back and forth, from past to present, relaying the events leading up to his disappearance. The novel tells a story about family, tragedy, and loss, but at the core of the story is the theme of this dissertation: coping with childhood trauma and depression.
The introduction focuses on recognizing childhood trauma in writing. Specifically, novels by Junot Diaz and Roxanne Gay are analyzed for evidence of depression as a result of childhood trauma. The analysis is conducted by examining the pieces for cognitive distortions. Cognitive distortions are biased perspectives — irrational thoughts and beliefs — that are unknowingly reinforced over time. There are seven cognitive distortions most frequently associated with severe depression and suicide: Arbitrary Inference, Selective Abstraction, Overgeneralization, Magnification, Minimization, Personalization, and Dichotomous Thinking. These are used to prove that the residual effects of childhood trauma bleed through the writing of childhood trauma survivors. Samples of both fiction and nonfiction pieces are reviewed, to further conclude that there are greater occurrences of cognitive distortions in the nonfiction work.
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