Encountering the More-Than-Human: Narration, Abjection and Pardon in Three Day Road

Abstract

Joseph Boyden’s Three Day Road takes place during World War I at the ambiguous boundary between culture and nature, madness and civilization, human and the more-than-human other. I argue that both the story and structure of Three Day Road illustrate and support the crucial link that Julia Kristeva makes between tradition and form-giving in respect of trauma and ethics. Kristeva’s thought helps to illuminate what cathartic narration must address in order to bring repressed otherness out of its confinement in nature. Specifically, this paper draws upon Richard Kearney’s definition of working-through and Kristeva’s psychoanalytic process in an analysis of abjection, the return of the repressed, and a pardon asked for that initiates a reconciliation between ourselves, culture, language and the social.