The Healing Path: Navigating Grief and Trauma Through the Labyrinth in Amanda Lohrey's Novel

Abstract

Background: Amanda Lohrey’s The Labyrinth is a beautiful book that is grounded in reality, the story of Erica that is depicted is highly relatable because it deals with the themes of grief and trauma which every individual has faced at certain points in time. The story is multi-layered yet compelling. Aims: This research aims to examine how The Labyrinth employs symbolism, particularly the motif of the labyrinth, as a narrative and psychological tool for processing grief and rebuilding fractured relationships. Methods: The study adopts an interpretivist approach, which emphasizes subjective meaning-making and seeks to understand characters’ experiences through close textual analysis and contextual interpretation. Result: The story focuses on the character of Erica who has moved to a remote little town in Australia after her son was imprisoned for murdering a person. In her own attempt to reconcile with her condition, she starts building a labyrinth with a newly found homeless person named Jurko, and eventually, the other town folks join her initiative and lend her support to finish the work on time. The other side of the novel focused more on the strained relationship between the mother and son. Even though Daniel refuses to talk to Erica at the beginning he eventually starts opening up, near the end of the novel Erica receives a report that states that Daniel is doing better in prison and has found someone who he looks up to as a father figure. Lohrey does not establish a proper conclusion for her story but there are suggestions that their relationship will improve. Implication: The results indicate that Lohrey’s novel is not only a contribution to Australian literary discourse, but that it also illustrates how literature operates as a context for interpreting trauma, our ability to overcome adversity and the slow regrowth of our ties as humans.