ArticleOpen Access http://dx.doi.org/10.26855/jhass.2025.11.011
Trauma and Recovery: Analysis of the Main Characters in The Ferryman
Yonghua Huang
College of Foreign Languages, Inner Mongolia Agricultural University, Hohhot 010010, Inner Mongolia, China.
*Corresponding author: Yonghua Huang
Published: December 09, 2025
Abstract
The Ferryman, written by the British writer Claire McFall, is a soul-healing novel that touches millions of readers. It tells a story of a teenage girl named Dylan who takes a train to visit her long-lost father, but is killed in a train accident. She then meets her soul ferryman, teenage Tristan, whose task is to lead souls to their destinations across the wasteland. The main thread driving the development of the story is the desperate and brave struggle of the two traumatized characters, Tristan escorting Dylan to her soul destination and Dylan counter-ferrying Tristan to the human world. Through a gradual awakening to protect each other and reestablish close social relationships, they cure themselves of the trauma they have suffered and redefine the meaning of love and life. Based on Judith Herman’s trauma theory, this paper analyzes trauma suffered by the main characters and their ultimate recovery from trauma and explores the gradual changes in their personalities and behaviors, which lead to their psychological growth and maturity.
Keyword
The Ferryman; Trauma Theory; Trauma; Recovery
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Copyright
© 2025 by the author(s).
This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) license, which permits non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not modified or adapted.
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How to cite this paper
Trauma and Recovery: Analysis of the Main Characters in The Ferryman
How to cite this paper: Yonghua Huang. (2025) Trauma and Recovery: Analysis of the Main Characters in The Ferryman. Journal of Humanities, Arts and Social Science, 9(11), 2143-2147.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.26855/jhass.2025.11.011