Download or read book The Virtues of Ever-present Absence in William Maxwell's They Came Like Swallows and So Long, See You Tomorrow written by Krista Jem Howe and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 107 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In So Long, See You Tomorrow (1980), William Maxwell revisits the traumatic experience of losing his mother to the Spanish Flu which he first wrote about in his second novel They Came Like Swallows (1937). The repetition of his mother’s death suggests that Maxwell’s novels are an acting out and working through of his own personal trauma which inspires a trauma theory approach to his novels. A trauma theory approach to his work not only re-interprets Maxwell’s novels as trauma narratives but examines them as autobiographical works that illustrate the function of autobiography in culture as literature that promotes both personal and cultural rehabilitation from trauma. In this two-chapter thesis, I examine They Came Like Swallows and So Long, See You Tomorrow as autobiographic trauma narratives and argue that they are receptacles of both personal and cultural “truths” that tap into absences that demand a witness to that which has been forgotten or repressed. I will first examine So Long, See You Tomorrow for what it is, a novel, and think about the ways it works as a commentary on the function of autobiographical storytelling and how this storytelling impacts the narrator. In the second chapter, I will look at both They Came Like Swallows and So Long, See You Tomorrow and discuss the way they produce an empathetic history that memorializes the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic and bear witness to the pain and suffering the pandemic caused.