Anuk Arudpragasam’s The Story of a Brief Marriage (2016) imaginatively recreates the last stage of Sri Lanka’s Civil War by chronicling a single day in the life of a young Tamil man in a refugee camp in the No Fire Zone. The novel’s graphic and disturbing memorialization of the violence of the war zone is powerful; as such, humanity and hope seem impossible. However, this seemingly impossible hope is precisely what this chapter focuses on by asking what solutions or ‘alternatives’ The Story of a Brief Marriage, albeit ever so tentatively, offers to war, trauma, and the loss of humanity in conditions of debilitating violence and extreme disruption. The chapter analyses how the protagonist navigates the impossible conditions of a ‘state of exception’ and ‘bare life’ and how, functionalizing the ‘abject’, he resorts to rituals to sustain his humanity and make meaning out of the nothingness he is reduced to. We argue that, in rendering the disavowed, the forcefully repressed, the unnamable and the unthinkable visible and present in the cultural imaginary, the novel offers its readers a possibility of renewal through cleansing by forcing them to acknowledge, take responsibility for and work through the horror of the (national) past.