"Relazioni affettive, trauma e narrazione in 'A Home at the End of the World' di Michael Cunningham"

This article examines how the notion of normative, nuclear family is questioned, dismantled and expanded in Michael Cunningham’s novel A Home at the End of the World (1990). Told in four different voices, the story focuses on two young boys who grow up in Cleveland in the 1970s and who come from different social backgrounds. As I argue, in this novel Cunningham narrativizes the process of reconstructing or forging ‘alternative’ queer family and kinship bonds, and demonstrates that both blood, biological and affective, nonbiological ties are all transient and subject to change. Moreover, by drawing on trauma studies, I discuss the extent to which macro- and microtraumas affect the characters’ lives, as is clear from the different perspectives provided by the four narrators. Ultimately, what emerges from their narratives is the need to articulate and transform deep emotional traumas into a never-ending search for the self and love.