Darkening of the Self: The Role of Trauma in the Construction of Identity in Neel Mukherjee’s The Lives of Others

Abstract

The lack of identity and to search a new one has arisen to become one of the significant
issues of trauma studies. My paper examines the role of identity which creates the
traumatic psyche of an individual as exemplified in The Lives of Others of Neel
Mukherjee. The novel is an account of a very disturbing time in the history of west
Bengal during the Naxalite period. The impact of the movement on individual psyche
caught in the vortex of the unrest created fissured selves. Supratik who belongs to a
well-to-do bourgeois family leaves home to establish his identity as a Naxal activist,
the ‘other’. Taking recourse in Maoist ideology, he aspires to become as ‘other’ through
violence. But he is disillusioned to realize that he is the ‘other’ even among the Others.
The life-long futile search of identity ends only at the death of Supratik. My present
paper proposes to explore different dimensions of trauma; how the aspiration to form
an altogether different identity is born out of trauma and also how the search for an
individual identity again leads one to encounter trauma.