Imagining the Blitz and Its Aftermath: The Narrative Performance of Trauma in Sarah Waters’s The Night Watch

Critics agree that Sarah Waters’ fourth novel, The Night Watch (2006), marks a turn in her fiction, away from the farcical tone of first three neo-Victorian novels and towards an ever-more serious concern with changes class structures gender roles brought about by fact war. novel tells parallel stories women one man living various areas London 1940s. Though they have different social status, ideology, sexual orientation, share similarly traumatic experiences as, together war trauma, harbour individual feelings loss and/or shame related to their deviance patriarchal norms. article seeks demonstrate palimpsestic backward structure performs formally ‘belatedness trauma’ (Caruth 1995, pp. 4–5), attempt respond aesthetically ethically ‘mnemonic void’ (Freud [1014] 1950) or ‘black hole’ (Pitman Orr 1990; Bloom 2010; Van der Kolk McFarlane [1998] 2004) left both characters’ traumatised psyches our cultural memory 1940s erased memories decade’s non-normative dissident others.