Some time ago, in reading one of founding texts of trauma studies, Cathy Caruth's Unclaimed Experience, I proposed her notion of entanglement offers a model for understanding how one historical trauma is implicated in another (see Ramadanovic). The Levinasian argument Caruth made and my essay extended was because we are mortal, our vulnerability is entangled with another's, though it is other's vulnerability and mortality we are, as a rule, blind to even as we speak of our own. (1) The entanglement is hence unwitting, unintentional, or unconscious. In present essay I want to try a somewhat different line of thinking about trauma narratives, concerning self-centeredness of trauma, begins with premise trauma effects a withdrawal from world and traumatized subject seems, at least in one of early phases of trauma, focused on him- or herself and closed off from anything can be construed as different, threatening, or alien. I would also like to generalize this premise to include, in addition to trauma, also postcolonial narrative. (2) My argument will be sketched in four main parts: in first, I will claim trauma narrative is defined through this narcissistic phase; in second, post-colonial narrative goes through same phase; in third, both trauma and post-colonial narratives are variations on modern Western narrative in very basic sense they are stories of becoming an autonomous subject (nation or person); and, in fourth, all three--trauma, post-colonial, and modern Western narratives-are in fact variants of Oedipus's ur-narrative of independence (even if Oedipal narrative is itself changing beyond model Freud and structuralist anthropology had in mind). The main goal of this argument is to bring us closer to understanding implications of what, after Caruth, we might call entanglement between Oedipal narrative and narratives of Western modernity, trauma, and post-coloniality.(3) As Freud noted in On Narcissism, a person is tormented by organic pain and discomfort gives up his interest in things of external world, in so far as they do not concern his suffering (82). More significantly, thesis makes sense theoretically since reestablishment of psychic unity after a trauma requires, as we learn from Freud's account of Fort/ Da, ego's mastery over entirety of psychic economy. (4) To borrow Margaret Whitford's words from a recent essay on narcissism, this active turning away from object and a withdrawal to internalized objects (207) is mechanism Fort/Da in particular and trauma in general share with narcissism. In these cases, in narcissism and in trauma, libido that has been withdrawn from external world has been directed to ego (Freud, On Narcissism 75). The narcissism in question is, of course, so-called primary narcissism (as opposed to secondary narcissism, which is a character trait), whose function Freud traces back to our most basic instinct for self-preservation. As he writes at beginning of On Narcissism, primary narcissism is the libidinal complement to egoism of instinct of self-preservation, a measure of which may justifiably be attributed to every living creature (73-74). (5) It is a form of self-centeredness characteristic of human beings and all other living creatures who are in some way aware of their wholeness and vulnerability. In Fort/Da, where mother's presences and absences are represented in throwing spool away and out of sight and reeling it in, narcissism serves first to define newly forming self and then to sustain it as a separate and different entity from mother's self. The Fort/ Da, then, is literally a self-defining and self-sustaining narcissistic process alternates between an internalizing and an externalizing gesture. …