ABSTRACT
In this chapter the author explores how melancholia, temporal disruptions, and linguistic fragility disclose human precariousness against the background of historical upheavals and individual failures. The author attempts to demonstrate how, by espousing her own wounds, Bela achieves a paradoxical search for her own self in connection with the natural fragility of the world. Bela's transition from melancholia to self-definition revolves around the transformation of her transgenerationally transmitted traumas and her sense of loss into a narrative understanding of the self based on the acceptance of fallibility and vulnerability. Fragility and vulnerability, therefore, influence the quest for identity, a process that Paul Ricoeur situates in proximity to mutual recognition. As in William Trevor's novel, The Lowland provides a testimony to vulnerability and attempts to heal pain and wounds. Bela's exposure to wounds and the environmental vulnerability mapped out by The Lowland are illuminated with a narrative perspective evocative of ghostly and temporal disruptions.
