ABSTRACT
The life-long impact of traumatic experience is the subject of the essays in this volume, Trauma and Life Stories. Traumatic experiences and their consequences often constitute the core of the life stories told by those who have survived natural disasters or war, or other kinds of social, state, or interpersonal violence. In this volume, we explore the relationship between the experiences of terror and helplessness that have caused trauma, the ways in which survivors remember, and the representation of these memories in the language and form of their life stories. The impact of trauma makes the processes of remembering and forgetting more complex than in other situations, and survivors are therefore particularly likely to express themselves in stories containing elements which are imaginary, fragmented or disjointed, and loaded with symbolism. This in turn means that the understanding and analysis of these stories is inevitably complicated and challenging.
