When Yours and Mine Are (Not) Ours: Reclaiming Personal and National Histories in Tim Butcher’s The Trigger: Hunting the Assassin Who Brought the World to War

Even though the WWI ended a century ago, it seems viable to say that its presence and consequences are still echoing in the (sub)conscious self of the peoples in the Western Balkans. This paper focuses on disclosure of possible linguistic traits within a literary text, which uncover the author’s attitude towards the cultural and historical events he depicts. The aim is to investigate the possibility of extracting the parallel personal and general histories, their overlapping points, be they cultural or historical, through the linguistic tools used. The main focal point is on juxtaposing information, whose meaning is overtly shaped by the culture(s) of the speaker and the generally accepted cultural and historical posits, within the stories portrayed.