ABSTRACT
The US novelist and travel writer Hanya Yanagihara is one of the most highly rated creative authors of the twenty-first century although she is at the very beginning of her writing career with two remarkable novels-The People in the Trees and A Little Life. In this chapter the author shows the way in which A Little Life constructs Jude's masochism after his traumatic childhood. She explains how the novel gainsays the romantic struggle of the traditional Bildungsroman hero to overcome suffering and privileges his agency instead. The author elaborates the positive aspect of masochism as a way of achieving mastery over one's traumatic experiences and self-cohesion even if tending to become destructive in the long run. She demonstrates that A Little Life envisages masochism as a platform to renegotiate and challenge one's traumatic inheritance and that the presentation of masochistic practices in such paradoxical terms offers Yanagihara the opportunity to experiment with a different representational and aesthetic model, the anti-Bildungsroman.
