https://doi.org/10.67147/literariness.v1i3.122
Representations of Existential Trauma in Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood and Arun Joshi’s The Strange Case of Billy Biswas
MR. VIJAYA KUMARA S
Assistant Professor
Shri K H Patil Government First Grade College, Hulukoti 582205
Affiliated to Karnatak University Dharwad.
&
Research Scholar
Department of Studies and Research in English
Vijayanagara Sri Krishnadevaraya University, Ballari
Abstract: This paper examines the representation of existential trauma in two landmark works of postcolonial and postmodern fiction: Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood (1987) and Arun Joshi’s The Strange Case of Billy Biswas (1971). Drawing on existentialist philosophical frameworks—particularly the thought of Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Simone de Beauvoir—alongside trauma theory as elaborated by Cathy Caruth and Shoshana Felman, this study argues that both novels construct trauma not merely as psychological wound but as an ontological rupture: a fracturing of the subject’s relationship with time, identity, community, and meaning. While Murakami’s Watanabe navigates the interior labyrinth of grief and erotic loss in post-war Tokyo, Joshi’s Billy Biswas enacts a more radical existential revolt, abandoning metropolitan civilisation for the primordial tribal world of central India. The article traces the shared grammar of estrangement, the impossibility of mourning, and the body as a site of existential negotiation that connects these geographically and culturally distant narratives. It concludes that both novels resist therapeutic resolution, insisting instead on the irreducible weight of traumatic experience as constitutive of modern selfhood.
Keywords: existential trauma, Norwegian Wood, The Strange Case of Billy Biswas, alienation, postcolonial fiction, Murakami, Joshi, grief, identity, postmodernism
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