<![CDATA[Background: Post-authoritarian Indonesia remains marked by unresolved memories of New Order violence, where official acknowledgement has not fully addressed cultural silence, stigma, disappearance, and deferred justice. Objective: This study examines how Indonesian fiction represents haunting, historical denial, and unfinished justice as interrelated narrative structures rather than separate thematic concerns. Method: Using qualitative close reading, episode-based coding, spectral motif analysis, denial–archive mapping, and ethical witnessing analysis, this study analyzes selected Indonesian novels and short fiction alongside scholarly and contextual materials. Results: Findings show that spectral return is concentrated in absent bodies, recurring memories, haunted spaces, fractured testimony, material traces, inherited stigma, and suspended mourning. Historical denial appears through euphemistic displacement, silenced testimony, missing archives, stigmatized identity, managed forgetting, displaced blame, and premature reconciliation. Unfinished justice is represented through refusal of closure, ethical witnessing, family recognition, delayed truth, postmemory inheritance, failed return, and moral indictment of impunity. Implication: This study argues that Indonesian fiction functions as a critical archive of cultural memory without being reduced to legal evidence or historical documentation. Novelty: This study advances post-authoritarian literary criticism by reading haunting as a methodological lens for connecting archival absence, narrative disturbance, and the politics of unfinished justice in Indonesian fiction.]]>
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