Recuperări identitare în romanul „Hipnotic” de Val Butnaru
Identity Recoveries in Val Butnaru’s Novel “Hypnotic”

Summary/Abstract: Val Butnaru's novel Hypnotic presents the acts of conscience of a family whose integrity and identity were done away by a representative of the ideological “good”, who tried to forge by indirect implications a “correct” life of the new man, the vulnerable man, of the man addicted to self-flagellation and self-pity. Thus, the whole narrative broadcasts the same drama, fragmented into dozens of seemingly confusing testimonies of the twin brothers. Together with the narrator, the separated brothers, orphans of both parents, lacking a clear certainty about their belonging and human value, weave a possible story of the cause of inner suffering. During the reading, the lines of the labyrinth are erased and absorbed into the being of the characters who experience various forms of constellation of the puzzle figures found in the subsidiary of memories. Here, the anamnesis is the only existential pillar, the greatest mystery of their failed life, which gathers them, as if in front of a sacred fire, to “push” themselves hypnotically back into life, into purposeness, into themselves, into the basement of long-demolished parental home. Until then, however, the brothers are trying different ways to overcome the identity crisis by imitating other models, imaginary personalities, which could give them a sense of human dignity. Therefore, the present study aims at a critical assessment of the representation of the condition of the individual marked by the repressions of the totalitarian regime.

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