It seems as though “trauma” is an inadequate word to describe what the characters from The Road have been through. Trauma of this magnitude has never been experienced, especially over such a prolonged period of time, therefore in a psychological manner if would be difficult if not impossible to predict what kind of effect such an experience would have on humans. I feel like McCarthy has done a pretty good job of depicting just this. Although the behavior that the man and the boy exhibit do not really fit into the PTSD niche as described in “The Black Hole of Trauma,” this is not your everyday sort of trauma. The man from The Road seems to be existing almost on survival instincts alone.
He simply will not allow himself to remember, as many trauma victims do, because for him he knows that remembering means dying. The only time his mind temporarily escapes to the past, whether it be good or bad memories is in sleep when he does not posess control over his consciousness. He believes that having any sort of positive hopes for the future mean death as well. Anything that takes him out of the immediate moment could potentially mean death for both he and his son. He is so focused, almost frozen in the present, hyper vigilant and overcautious that he is not able to experience many of the typical side effects that many trauma victims suffer, according to the article.
It is interesting, though, that the only time his mind remembers is in sleep. I think this exhibits the human mind’s tendency to remember and relive traumatic experiences, because that is what happens when he is forced to let go of his thoughts in sleep. It is only in the waking hours that he keeps a tight, vice-like grip over his consciousness which does not allow him to remember for fear of dying.
I like your characterization of the word trauma as “inadequate” for The Road. This is similar to what I was getting at in class on Thursday, with my chart of the Comic World and Tragic World. There needs to be a third column, one that goes beyond the Tragic. Tragedy and trauma are words incapable of conveying the full extent of the dying world in the novel. As a thought experiment I’ve been playing around the name of this third column, for which traditional notions of trauma are inadequate. Meta is the suffix for “beyond.” So maybe metatrauma or metatragedy? Para also means beyond, so what about paratrauma or paratragedy?