How does a fragmented war story turn one veteran's traumatic memories into a collective testimony?

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The abstract begins with the claim that traumatic experiences have a prelinguistic tendency. It presents war fiction as challenging that claim by reflecting on the components of war and bearing witness to both its overwhelming nature and its ambiguous realities. In this account, recalling war's traumatic wounds becomes a form of testimony, grounded in narrators' desire to move beyond the confines of individual experience toward a collective one.

Set against the background of the 2003 Iraq War, Mariette Kalinowski's “The Train” portrays war's aftermath and the difficulties soldiers face in returning to ordinary life after coming home. Its conflict is psychological, unfolding within the consciousness of a female soldier whose traumatized memory struggles with a past that haunts the present.

The study argues that the story follows the traumatized consciousness of an American veteran through fragmentation, a nonlinear plot, and movement between past and present. It also interprets the story as a testimonial narrative intended to record individual suffering and place it within a collective framework that encourages solidarity among wounded victims.

The study is a literary analysis drawing on the psychological and literary aspects of trauma theory. It draws substantially on Cathy Caruth's “Unclaimed Experiences,” Ann Whitehead's “Trauma Fiction,” Shoshana Felman's “Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History,” and other trauma theorists.