Anti-Natalism as a Remedy for Trauma

Post 9/11 American literature dealing with a collective national trauma created a new venue not only where healing narratives emerged but also to ponder on a whole new scope of traumatic stressors on a global scale. Expanding into the realm of the yet unwitnessed as opposed to the original trauma may read like a dissociative response, that refuses to face the immensity of the traumatic event or an exceptionalist response that confines the experience to U.S. borders. Rather than avoidance, however, the dissociative split in Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom (2010) harbors real and possible trauma both on a personal and collective level. Franzen expands an event into transgenerational trauma, loss, betrayal and grief, global overpopulation, climate change and presents the ultimate solution to all. The solution, anti-natalism, is perpetuated by Walter Berglund, one of the main characters who experiences a tragic betrayal; although counterintutive to him and everyone else around him, appears to be an inevitable consequence given the characters’ inability to come to terms with their own personal truma and the human condition on a global scale. Through Franzen’s novel, I will present how anti-natalism emerges as a constructive remedy for nature, human beings, and the planet as a whole