THE ART OF SITUATIONAL CONSTRUCTION IN VIET THANH NGUYEN'S SHORT STORY COLLECTION THE REFUGEES

Abstract

This article examines the art of constructing narrative situations in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s short story collection The Refugees through the combined perspectives of psychoanalytic criticism, existential philosophy, and migration literature studies. Conceiving narrative situation as the structural core through which a text’s central conflict is organized and revealed, the study focuses on two prominent dimensions: situations of hardship and ordeal associated with the journey of escape by sea and the provisional life in refugee camps, and situations of cultural conflict arising in the context of resettlement. Through an analysis of representative stories, the article shows that Nguyen frequently constructs pivotal circumstances, interweaves the present with memory, and employs strategic silences together with symbolically charged details to foreground psychological trauma, the sense of exile, and the crisis of identity experienced by his characters. In this way, narrative situations function not only as mechanisms for advancing the plot but also as artistic devices for expressing psychological depth and the migrant subject’s ongoing negotiation of identity within multicultural spaces.