ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the key concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book draws attention to the disastrous consequences of trauma not only for the individual but also for the community. It summarizes the categories of victim, perpetrator and bystander by emphasizing the fuzzy and fluid limits that separate them, favoring a non-categorical stance. Political dissidents and sexual minorities are attacked, imprisoned or even murdered—often by their governments—on an everyday basis in many countries of the world. An optimist like E. L. Doctorow seemed to have retained a belief in the oppositional role of literature, in the power of the aesthetic to inspire the necessary ethical and political change to make a more just and less indifferent world possible. Capital circulates the world more freely than people, while refugees are kept in detention centers and camps behind barbed-wired walls and fences.
