Abstract

This thesis is interested in examining the rhetorical device of textual excess and how its use in Hanya Yanagihara’s 2015 novel A Little Life complicates plausibility, insofar as it concerns the genre of trauma fiction. I will specifically tend to the tension between the aesthetic objectives of A Little Life and how they conflict with the ethics of representation by defining “aesthetic” interests as those invested in the lavish glamours of the book and contrasting them with the aesthetic of suffering which constitutes Jude St. Francis’s being, and consequently bleeds into the rest of the novel. A Little Life is both renown and reviled for its famously distressed protagonist and his continuous misfortunes, such that it has joined the chorus of literature that favors pushing fiction past its textual and moral limits—not only was it published in a climate in which the preoccupation around authorial responsibility persists, but its events take this concern to a nearly unprecedented extreme. The result of this aesthetic marriage is both frustrating and urgent, in that Jude’s textual treatment subverts the reader’s expectations around believability as a spectator to his myriad abuses. Ultimately, even though the novel’s aesthetic choices trigger major morality points concerning the text’s commitment to describing and prescribing pain, the trigger itself is necessary in that it generates critical questions on representation and therefore what is represented is grounds for critiquing the nature and narrative of recovery from physical and psychological trauma.