Children's Voices of War Victims in “Stolen Child” by Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.15330/clid.1.1.67-77Keywords:
literature about war, military themes, child-narrator, psychologism of the story, traumatic experience of warAbstract
The article analyzes the novel Stolen Child by the Canadian writer Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch. It stands out among other works of military themes by the artistic perfection of revealing the painful topic of human destinies crippled by war and lost childhood, by the plot thought out to the details, psychologism of the image of a child hurt by war criminals. The author conveyed all the tragedy and drama of the events through the prism of children's suffering and pain. In one story of a stolen child, the writer showed the fate of hundreds of thousands of Polish and Ukrainian children who became victims of the Lebensborg program during World War II. The life of the main character, a twelve-year-old girl from Ukraine, is full of losses, fear, trying to remember the past and understand who she really is. Before ending up in Canada, the child experienced the loss of parents, hunger, loneliness, bullying, humiliation, and spent five years in a camp for displaced persons.
Artistic interpretation of the inner world, children's pain, suffering, loneliness, self-searching, love and hate, perception of others, experiencing school bullying and adaptation in a new country and realities - all these is not the complete list of problems raised by the writer in her novel.
The issue of the relocation of Ukrainians and representatives of other nationalities to Canada and the arrangement of their lives, interaction with the rest of the population deserves special attention in the novel. This is “a gripping exploration of war-induced trauma, identity, and transformation” (Stolen Child).
The combination of the story about the post-war events from the emigrant life of the young storyteller is synthesized with memories, dreams, visions from the past. In the process of a systematic literary analysis of the poetics of the novel, the artistic representation of a child’s traumatic experience of war is considered. Its “voicing” at different levels of the work: in the relevant issues, the mosaic plot, the dynamic narration of the homodiegetic child-narrator in the introdiegetic situation, the psychologism of the image of the main character, the time-space plane, other images - symbols, military markers and artistic details are substantiated. The novel is examined in the context of literature for young readers, taking into account the perspective of double addressing.
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