War, Trauma and Hybrid Identities in Novels by Vladimir Tabašević, Lana Bastašić and Darko Cvijetić

Abstract

In this paper we analyse the literary modelling of the war, e.g. war experience, as well as trauma on examples of novels Quietly flows Mississippi by Vladimir Tabašević (2015), Catch the rabbit by Lana Bastašić (2018) and Why do you sleep on the floor by Darko Cvijetić (2020). In these three novels, various narrative perspectives (children’s perspective, past-present perspective and multifocalisation) influence the impression and literary representations of the civil war in Yugoslavia (1991‒1995), as well as the psychological consequences of this experience by generating different traumas. The question of hybrid identity is motivated in a twofold manner: through the linguistic, national, ethical and emotional ambivalence of protagonists of the novels, and through the national background of these three authors. After the introduction, the methodological setting of the research and theoretical explications of terms trauma, identity, memory and postmemory, we interpret these aspects on various examples from the novels.