A Critical Pragmatic Study of War Traumain the Novel The President’s Gardens

AbstractThis study aims to analyze thenovel The President's Garden s inorder to detect and explain themethods and strategies that thewriter used to portray the trauma ofthe war and the effects of this traumaon the individual and collectiveidentity of the Iraq i people. Thestudy also aims to offer a betterunderstandi ng of how individualsand societies cope with the longlasting consequences of the violence,oppression and foreign occupationthat Iraq has suffered from . It adoptsa qualitative research approachbecause it an adequate approach thatcan be used to investigate theconcepts of war trauma, powerrelations and the conflicts ofideology that are heavily prese ntedand expressed in the novel. T hispurpose is achieved by using thetools of the Critical Pragmatics (CP)approach to provide a deep andaccurate answer to the questions ofthe study. The study has found thatthe linguistic choices that are madeby the writer, such as metaphors,euphemisms, silences, andfragmented speech reveal a deepengagement with the psychologicaland sociopolitical dimensions oftrauma . Moreover, pragmatic toolssuch as speech acts, implicature, andpresupposition have been heavilyused to reveal the hidden powerdynamics that shape the experiencesof the characters of the novel.