%0 Journal Article
%T When Objects Speak: Thing Narrative, Trauma, and Identity in Joyce Carol Oates¡¯s <em>Carthage</em>
%A Lingling Xu
%J Open Access Library Journal
%V 12
%N 12
%P 1-10
%@ 2333-9721
%D 2025
%I Open Access Library
%R 10.4236/oalib.1114720
%X This study applies thing narrative theory to analyze Joyce Carol Oates¡¯s <em>Carthage</em> (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 <em>Carthage</em> are no longer passive symbols but as narrative agents that render visible the wounds embedded in both military commemoration and family dynamics.<br />
%K Thing Narrative
%K Trauma
%K Material Objects
%K Joyce Carol Oates
%K <i/>Carthage<i>
%U http://www.oalib.com/paper/6883041