When Objects Speak: Thing Narrative, Trauma, and Identity in Joyce Carol Oates’s Carthage

This study applies thing narrative theory to analyze Joyce Carol Oates’s Carthage (2014), examining how material objects function as active agents in trauma narratives. Focusing on Brett Kincaid’s Purple Heart medal and Cressida Mayfield’s drawings, this study attempts to answer how objects materialize traumatic experience that resists linguistic expression, how they exercise agency in shaping character behaviors and emotions, and how human-object interactions construct and transform identity. The finding reveals that the Purple Heart, awarded for military service, becomes a site of contradictory meanings. It simultaneously symbolizes honor and materializes destruction which exposes the gap between patriotic rhetoric and veteran suffering. Cressida’s Escher-influenced artworks materialize her experience of familial misrecognition and social invisibility, exercising their fullest agency only after her disappearance. Through this material lens, the study demonstrates that the objects in Carthage are no longer passive symbols but as narrative agents that render visible the wounds embedded in both military commemoration and family dynamics.