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    Border Crossing Pat Barker

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    Ayla Yiğit
    The document discusses Pat Barker's novel Border Crossing and its themes of redemption and humanity's capacity for both good and evil. The novel examines whether the main character Danny is inherently evil or influenced by his background and upbringing through his psychologist Tom Seymour. It also references real life cases of child murderers Robert Thompson and Jon Venables that were released from custody around the same time to draw parallels. Barker is interested in the process of recovering from trauma and how addressing traumatic memories through language can help subdue them.

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    Border Crossing Pat Barker

    Uploaded by

    Ayla Yiğit
    76 views11 pages
    The document discusses Pat Barker's novel Border Crossing and its themes of redemption and humanity's capacity for both good and evil. The novel examines whether the main character Danny is inherently evil or influenced by his background and upbringing through his psychologist Tom Seymour. It also references real life cases of child murderers Robert Thompson and Jon Venables that were released from custody around the same time to draw parallels. Barker is interested in the process of recovering from trauma and how addressing traumatic memories through language can help subdue them.

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    border crossing Pat Barker

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    The document discusses Pat Barker's novel Border Crossing and its themes of redemption and humanity's capacity for both good and evil. The novel examines whether the main character Danny is inherently evil or influenced by his background and upbringing through his psychologist Tom Seymour. It also references real life cases of child murderers Robert Thompson and Jon Venables that were released from custody around the same time to draw parallels. Barker is interested in the process of recovering from trauma and how addressing traumatic memories through language can help subdue them.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PPTX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pptx, pdf, or txt
    76 views11 pages

    Border Crossing Pat Barker

    Uploaded by

    Ayla Yiğit
    The document discusses Pat Barker's novel Border Crossing and its themes of redemption and humanity's capacity for both good and evil. The novel examines whether the main character Danny is inherently evil or influenced by his background and upbringing through his psychologist Tom Seymour. It also references real life cases of child murderers Robert Thompson and Jon Venables that were released from custody around the same time to draw parallels. Barker is interested in the process of recovering from trauma and how addressing traumatic memories through language can help subdue them.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PPTX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pptx, pdf, or txt
    of 11

    Representation of Evil and

    Trauma in Border Crossing


    By Pat Barker
    Pat Barker is concerned with themes of
    “salvation and redemption
    “the capacity of human beings to turn
    from evil to good.”

    These themes are understood in


    “a secular way”
    “historicist & humanist terms”
    (Brannigan 140).
    A number of characters in the novel are
    professionally involved in the task of “rehabilitating” or
    reorienting other people toward socially constrısted behavior.

    with some capacity to record, analyze,


    and more significantly some form of authority to represent others.

    “Intellectuals, cultural producers are important because


    they help maintain or undermine belief in the legitimacy of the
    prevailing power arrangements” (Brannigan 140).
    The main question in Border Crossing is
    whether Danny is evil, and if there is
    such a thing as “being evil” or if there
    simply are good people doing evil deeds.

    Do Danny's family and background play


    a part in the murder or is it all his own
    doing; is he the only one to blame?
    Barker looks at this point of view with
    scepticism and brings up the fact that we
    might all be capable of murder.

    A situation in the book that shows this is


    the one that Tom found himself in when
    he was a young boy and he and his friend
    were looking after another child, and the
    day almost ended in a tragedy.
    It is an interesting that at the same time as the release
    of the novel, there was another release, the release of
    two child murderers in England that drew huge
    attention.
    Robert Thompson and Jon Venables. At the time of the
    publication of Border Crossing, these two young men were
    released.

    They were released from custody at nineteen years of age,


    having spent time in a juvenile detention home after they
    abducted and killed two-year-old James Bulger, when they
    were only eleven, in 1993.

    Although they were released, they were still sentenced to


    lifelong parole. The two eleven-year-old boys were seen in a
    shopping district the day of the murder, where they
    appeared to be observing children.

    Later on, it was said that they were picking out a victim.
    The article “Young Know What is Wrong” by Stephen
    Blease in the North West Evening Mail, mentions that
    the boys were planning to abduct a child and then bring
    him to a busy road and push him in front of traffic.

    James Bulger and his mother were also at this shopping


    district that day. The two boys saw James, took him by
    the hand and led him outside while James' mother was
    placing an order at a butcher shop. This was caught on
    tape by a CCTV camera. They then tortured and hit him
    until he died. Afterwards, they placed the body on a
    railway, hoping to make it seem like an accident.
    The real life cases have similarities with Danny and the
    psychologist Tom Seymour, and in the novel we read
    about some events that happened in his life.

    Danny is a young man of 23 years with a troublesome


    background.

    At the beginning of the novel he has recently got out


    from rehabilitation which he has been in since he was
    ten, when he murdered an old lady.
    One day he decides to throw himself into the river, but he is saved by
    his old psychologist Tom Seymour.

    Whether this is a major coincidence or not, we do not know until


    later on in the book.

    Together they start to unveil Danny's past and discover the truth
    about the murder.
    In an interview when asked to Barker: Why is trauma your subject? She
    replies:

    I think I’m attracted not to trauma but to the


    process of recovery from it, and if, like with a
    broken bone, people can heal stronger than if
    they had never had it. I’m also interested in the
    idea that trauma memories are recorded in an
    entirely different way than ordinary memories.
    They are recorded by a more primitive part of the
    brain… one of the reasons that recovery works is
    that you are transposing that memory to a higher
    part of the brain so that language becomes a way of
    subduing it. (Dougherty Interview, 2004)

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