“Victor Forde, I can never resist your smile”: A Study of Trauma in Roddy Doyle’s Smile

Abstract

“Victor Forde, I can never resist your smile” is quoted from Roddy Doyle’s novel Smile (2017), and is pronounced by a Catholic school teacher who feels an inappropriate interest in Victor, his student. Significantly, this quote signals the inception of the first-person narrator’s trauma as a victim of child sexual abuse and its life-long consequences. Both the novel’s content and its particular narrative structure and literary devices are affected by trauma, which the first-person narrator –a writer himself- aims at verbalizing experience and the healing quality of literature and story-telling in Doyle’s novel. As one of the major constituents of traumatic experience, pain is the central element in Smile: the progressive discovery of details about the shock that caused the trauma and its consequences in the life of the protagonist, Victor, is also a process of revealing a painful truth. Violence of all kinds –physical, sexual and psychological- is also omnipresent in the novel, whose social and historical background also enhances the inherent violence that Ireland suffered, especially in the twenty and early first twenty-first centuries. In this sense, one of the most evident effects that trauma has had on the protagonist’s fictionalization of his own life in the novel, in which memory and imagination also play an important role, since Victor creates a character to stop his delusion. In this sense, the notion of storytelling and lying are at the heart of the novel and pose forward postmodern narrative issues which relate to metafictional assumptions by addressing the character as the novel’s unreliable creator. Thus, the novel functions in terms of a double manipulation: Victor’s own conviction of the existence of the world he has created and the reader’s belief in the plot that the author presents.To pursue this aim, this dissertation will be informed by, among others, trauma studies, such as Cathy Caruth’s seminal works Trauma: Explorations in Memory (1995) and Listening to Trauma: Conversations with Leaders in the Theory and Treatment of Catastrophic Experience (2014)