tness’ (Laub 76).A person that experiences a traumatic event has trouble, in many ways, witnessing the event even though they were physically there. This relates to the concept that trauma and traumatic events can not be incorporated into the mainstream of the social. People can not master the concept and therefore can not incorporate the event into their everyday life and everyday understanding. Laub says, “the loss of the capacity to be a witness to oneself and thus to witness from the inside is perhaps the true meaning of annihilation, for when one’s history is abolished one’s identity ceases to exist as well” (Laub 82). In other words, people have difficulty being a witness, but by not acknowledging the traumatic event, by the ‘collapse of the witness’, it is actually the collapse of that person’s identity. Therefore there is a constant struggle to not have a ‘collapse of witness’ in order to not lose one’s identity, but also to not be a witness in order not to have to face the trauma.The ‘collapse of witness’ of a person that has physically experienced a traumatic event can be connected to the latency period discussed by Caruth. The latency period, as defined by Caruth, is the period, “during which the effects of the experience are not apparent” (Caruth 7). According to Caruth, people can not always realize the effect that an event may have had on them. The period of time from which the event actually took place and any sign of effect from the event, may be a time where a person may underestimate the effects of the event. The significance of this is that the latency is, “what precisely preserves the event in its literality” (Caruth 8). The latency period is what causes the event to be imbedded into one’s mind forever. The latency period, similarly to the ‘collapse of a witness’, is a period of time when...
