ETHICS, TRAUMA AND SURVIVAL IN INSTITUTIONAL SPACES : AN ARTICLE REVIEW OF COLSON WHITEHEAD’S THE NICKEL BOYS

Objective: The article investigates how institutional sphere works as a formative environment for trauma and as a site of ethical negotiation in “Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys”. It posits that the institutional setting shapes memory, vulnerability, and agency by constraining bodies while paradoxically offering moments of moral reckoning that shape survival strategies. Method: Methodologically, the study employs close reading of key scenes, longitudinal tracking of character trajectories, and comparative attention to official narratives versus counter-narratives embedded in memory, testimony, and coded silence. Results: Through the findings there is a unveiling that survival hinges on negotiating positionalities within coercive spaces: compliance, complicity and rebellion emerge as divergent ethical responses which destabilize simplistic binaries of victim and perpetrator. The review highlights moments where institutional design yields inadvertent pedagogies of resistance, ethics of care, and micro-infrastructures of trust that enable partial redress, even within environments calibrated to immobilize subjectivity. Novelty: The review concludes that the novel substantiates a critique of custodial spaces as actors in moral formation, while also insisting on the possibility of survivals that insist on accountability and remembrance. By following up the choreography of both the memory space and time, the analysis contributes to a more comprehensive discussion about childhood trauma, historical injustice, and the ethics of survival within oppressive institutions.