馬丁·艾米斯的創傷小說有一個共同主題就是愛情。創傷和愛情形成一種凄美的耦合,暗示著愛情與痛苦的緊密相伴,生命和死亡、在場和缺失、真實和虛幻在一個閾限空間內密集存在。創傷與愛情的交織、個體與集體的契合,使艾米斯的小說創作顛覆了傳統文類的書寫模式,背離了道德主題的表現常規;自戀與分離的連接、自我與他者的融合,揭示出暴力與反抗的行為動機,還原了人物自我分裂的雙重本性。小說中的敘述者既是犯罪者和受害者,又是幸存者和見證人。從《時間之箭》中的大屠殺,經過《夜車》中的離奇死亡,到《會客房》中的西伯利亞集中營,艾米斯借助敘述者之口,追蹤不為人知的心酸往事、救贖麻木與懺悔的心靈以及解脫已知與未知之間的困惑,在支離破碎的故事講述中進行漫游式的探索,在大量的擴張之后得以最終實現對本真自我的尋求。

In Martin Amis’ s trauma novels, love is a common motif. The coupling of trauma and romance suggests the intimacy between love and pain, usually in a liminal space simultaneously harboring life and bereavement, presence and absence, the real and the spectral. Such interweaving of trauma and romance, of the individual and the collective, effectively subverts traditional genres and deviates from the conventional expression of moral themes. Through the fusion of narcissism and dissociation, of the self and the other, Amis reveals the motive behind behavioral patterns of violence and resistance, and through such characterization exposes the duality of human nature. The narrators are not only perpetrators and victims of their own crimes, but also survivors and witnesses. From the Holocaust in Time’s Arrow(1991), through suspicious death in Night Train(1997), to the Siberian slave camps in House of Meetings(2007), Amis explores these characters’ wandering quest for self through their fragmented story-telling haunted by past events, and traces their struggles between knowing and unknowing before ultimately achieving authenticity.