I Belong to the Lake and Coherence, Incoherence and the Recognition of the Strange in Narratives of Illness and Trauma

The novel 'I Belong to the Lake' and an accompanying exegesis 'Coherence, Incoherence and the Recognition of the Strange in Narratives of Illness and Trauma' address the question: 'How can we represent the familiar made strange in narratives of illness and trauma, particularly when shock and grief impairs our sense of the structures of time and language?' Through creative and theoretical explorations, including a close reading of Don DeLillo's 'The Body Artist', this combined work recognises fragmentation, discontinuity and uncertainty not as aberrations to narrative norms, but rather as signifiers necessary to the responsible representation of illness or trauma.