This essay attempts to read William Wordsworth’s The Ruined Cottage with Lee Chang-dong’s Peppermint Candy, using the concept of trauma as a guiding thread of analysis. What is at stake in this essay is nothing less than the question of how the unrepresented traumatic event can be transmitted. In order to answer this question, this essay takes a detour through Charles Shepherdson’s commentary of trauma and Alenka Zupančič’s elaboration of event as possibility or virtuality. The trauma as possibility is in turn put into relation with Jacques Khalip’s formulation of event which is not represented but rather ex-pressed by the literary. The reading of The Ruined Cottage focuses primarily on the Pedlar’s story of Margaret that does not only ex-press the trauma of Margaret but also even exposes the trauma of the Pedlar himself. This leads us to consider how the story described as a dream by the Pedlar, an idle dreamer, would be transmitted to the narrator in this poem. In Peppermint Candy, the narrative shown in reverse chronology serves as the literary that ex-presses the traumatic event. The unfamiliar possibilities of trauma that are always already embedded in the familiar historical scenes would manifest themselves in this formal structure of reverse chronology.