Visual inspirations of A Little Life

Abstract

ABSTRACT Hanya Yanagihara’s critically acclaimed second novel A Little Life was published in 2015 and despite its length and disturbing thematic concerns soon became a bestseller. Yanagihara has laid her creative process bare in various interviews and has been open about the intermedial inspiration she has drawn from photography and painting. These sources provide an opportunity for the scholar to accurately and precisely trace how visual arts interact with the text before, during, and even after its conception. Critics predominantly responded to the novel about how comprehensively the author depicted child sexual abuse, violence, and trauma. The author merges generic conventions such as the Bildungsroman and fairy tale while constructing her plot and draws a significant amount of her inspiration from images. Seemingly contrasting affective impressions emanating from the images and the text converge in harmony and lead to an apt portrayal of the protagonist’s psyche and the reader’s ambiguous perception of his trauma. The article scrutinizes the use of photographs, paintings, and other visual material in the creative process of the novel in an ekphrastic mode both descriptively and non-descriptively, the latter to create a mood in the story rather than present a realistic depiction of the objects in question.