Although it may sometimes be hard to face reality, tough things do happen in life that cannot be undone; yet, there are also many favorable things that happen in life. One year, a person could lose someone very close to them and be completely devastated and the next year, that same person could go on to get the job of their dreams or meet their soul mate. Life has a weird way of working itself out and in Marilynne Robinson’s book Lila, Robinson depicts the life of a self-proclaimed orphan who faces various degrees of extremes in her life. At a young age the orphan, Lila, is taken from an unloving household and rescued by a lady named Doll. As Lila grows into a young adult and even into an adult, she is faced with having flashbacks and moving beyond her past in order to live in the present. Unfortunately for Lila, she experiences several traumatic events. Lila has many questions to ask when she meets the preacher, John Ames, who she later marries. One of the first times Ames is introduced in the book, Lila asks him, “…why things happen the way they do” (Robinson 29). By looking at the novel Lila, by Marilynne Robinson, we can see how much of an affect Lila’s childhood traumas have had on her. Seeing the impact of the trauma is vital because the emotional trauma Lila faces impacts the way Lila sees the and experiences the world around her.

In her life, Lila is in connect with a large network of people because she lacks one specific location to call home which causes her to be unfamiliar with herself. Along the way to finding herself, Lila, stays with a man named Doane who is a rude old man. On pages 109 and 110 of the novel, Robinson talks about the instance where Doll decides to run away from Doane’s house after Doane yells at his wife, Marcelle. Doll is gone for four days after that and somewhere along the journey, she finds Lila on the front steps of a church. In the moment, Lila realized “an orphan is what she was, and she knew it then” (Robinson 110). This part of the book is significant because we get a better look into what the trauma does to Lila emotionally. She does not think of herself as a person, but only as an orphan. She is stuck with the idea that no one really wants her in their lives. Another way to look at this would be in the way Wulf Rossler defines the impact of trauma on emotion in his book Trauma as a risk factor for onset of subclinical psychotic experiences. After an abundance of research and various studies, there has been a mass of evidence found for the large role that environmental factors play in increasing the risk for a person to experience psychosis. Psychosis means a person is likely to have an impaired relationship with the reality around them (Rossler). Lila hears things that may not seem to be real. While at the church, Lila overhears someone talking about a person eavesdropping on a conversation and therefore not really hearing it. This was the first time Lila had ever heard someone talk this way about existence; “…the great storms that rise in it” (Robinson 110). Life has a funny way of working itself out sometimes. By the great storms referred to in the book, the author is talking about when one bad thing happens, it brings with it a “great storm” of other things. The effects of childhood trauma and psychosis can be a continuum with varied levels of severity (Rossler). In other words, Lila experiences a mix of highs and lows (a great storm) which is a never ending cycle because of her childhood trauma. 

The idea of existentialism comes from thinking about the reason a person exists and why that person is here. Throughout the book, Lila seems to question her existence. On pages 178 to 179 of the book Lila, Lila has a conversation with the old man about her thoughts on existence. She first thinks back to the preacher’s sermons she’s heard, yet she does not quite hear him talk about existence, but knows he should have, at least once. She goes on to say, “she wished she’d known more about it, or at least known there was a name for it” (Robinson 178). This statement leads the reader to believe that Lila has always thought about existence without knowing what it was she was thinking about. In the article The Existential Basis of Trauma, Neil Thompson and Mary Walsh explain that a common reaction to going through a traumatic experience is often severe disorientation, and often people also lose a sense of self in the process (378). Lila begins to realize her feeling of disconnect from the world when she says, “you can say to yourself, I’m just a body that thinks and talks and seems to want its life, one more day of it” (179). When put like this, “existence” sounds like something that is forced upon a person. The use of the word “body” rather than “person” in this statement depicts Lila’s feeling of meaninglessness in life. It is said that going through a trauma, especially as a child, challenges a person’s sense of where and what that person is supposed to do in the world. Trauma can even make a person feel undermined in the identity aspect of their life (Marsh and Thompson 379). Lila has no real idea about where she came from which causes her to have trouble understanding why she exists and how she is supposed to move on from her trauma.

Lila’s past is something that looms over her for the majority of the novel. She has flashbacks varying from the accident to hanging out with Doll at the different houses they stayed in. On page 219 of the novel, Lila was riding in a car with her window open just looking outside to nature and when she had the thought that one day she would go to some lonely place somewhere to lay down and allow the world to take her life away (219). From this phrase, the reader can get the idea that the thought of death is something Lila seems to think about from time to time. Furthermore, her statement gives the reader the notion that Lila wants to commit suicide at some point. Each time she thinks about death, she is also thinking about the old times which include her trauma. In existentialism, there is place known as “the abyss” which refers to the world people experience after a trauma when they begin thinking more about their morality and realize there is an ending in the future (Thompson and Walsh 381). This particular topic is something that the majority of people on this earth do not think about, but Lila does. As a child, going through the traumatic events that she did led her to realize that death is a real thing and, most of the time, people do not know when it is coming. Lila goes on to say “the world don’t want you as long as there is any life in you at all” (Robinson 219). This is a very striking quote because it shows just how cruel the world has been to Lila. Robinson describes that the world does not want a person if they have any kind of life. In short, the world does not want anyone. With the thought of the world not wanting a person, is it possible for that person to feel as though they have an identity? The concept of identity is said to be the linking between the past and the future. The concept of trauma and the concept of identity clashing, can weaken or even damage the connection between a person’s sense of past and future. As a result, a person’s identity can be skewed or lost, leaving that person questioning their existence (Thompson and Walsh 380). After reading this, it is no surprise that Lila feels the way she does. Her early life trauma causes her to think about death as a reality.

In Marylinne Robinson’s book entitled Lila, Robinson writes about a girl named Lila who goes through a traumatic event early in her life that causes her to struggle with the idea of existence as an adult. Existence is a strange concept that means something different to every single person. For some, it is a wonderful thing, and for others it poses a threat. People live their lives not knowing what will happen next because life has a lot of uncertainties to it. Now, imagine feeling like you do not know where you will go or who you become all because of a past traumatic event. Every day the question “why do things happen the way they do?” comes to mind and that is all a person can think about. The past can be a scary thing to think about because what happened in the past is something that cannot be changed. Everyone has to live with their past and for some people all it does is haunt them. Lila may have to live with the repercussions of her traumatic childhood, but every person gets to decide whether they let the past become the future. Think responsibly. 
