From Grief to Grievance: Terror, Trauma and Existential Quest in Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers

Abstract

Since its publication, Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel In the Shadow of No Towers has been read and analyzed with the special lens of trauma theory owing to its autobiographical account of Art Spiegelman’s response to the fall of twin towers on September 11, 2001. No doubt, the novel represents all features of trauma fiction but reading it from this specific perspective can narrow or hide its other aspects. So this study aims to analyze the novel with mixed perspectives of trauma and Sartre’s existentialism and shows the message that this graphic novel forwards beyond trauma. So, it shows that there is an existential message, in the form of narrator-protagonist’s existential quest, that this novel conveys in the face of terror and trauma–narrator’s grief turns into grievance and sparks an existential quest which offers reverberations of our contemporary world of ruptures.