“Am I not OK?”: Negotiating and Re-Defining Traumatic Experience in Emma Donoghue’s Room

Abstract

This article analyses the ways in which Emma Donoghue’s novel Room interrogates how experiences of violence are represented and understood. With a focus on Donoghue’s choice to narrate the novel from the perspective of a young child, I suggest that Room not only questions how trauma is externally imposed onto individuals’ stories, but also queries whether or not the clinical language of trauma is in fact a useful one for describing the nuances and paradoxes of experiencing violence.