Fiction can replay historical trauma with a wished-for different outcome

Evidence

In the novel, kinds of reading are also shaped by desire—the most urgent being Jack’s/Updike’s desire to save Ahmad and therefore replay (or re-read) 9/11, with a positive outcome this time. Jack’s job is to introduce doubt into Ahmad’s sealed faith. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 140

Categorization

• XREF: This ‘re-reading 9/11 with a positive outcome’ mechanism is a sharp tool for reading How to Win a Cosmic War night—Naqvi’s and Hamid’s novels also stage parallel/divergent re-readings of 9/11-era scripts. — connects to: Narrative repair of wounds mirrors neural repair and sustains it. — Catherine Malabou, The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain…, 3893; Fiction can reframe a disaster’s aftermath itself as the true event — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 117; A national historical trauma can shape a writer’s formal style unconsciously — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 505