Überholtes Überleben oder die Verschriftung des Gedenkens
Thoughts on the traumatic concept of reality in Johanna Adorján’s novel „An Exclusive Love”

Thoughts on the traumatic concept of reality in Johanna Adorján’s novel „An Exclusive Love”

Summary/Abstract: This paper focuses on the question of how a young adult can cope with the trauma of the grandparents’ joint suicide with the help of literature and literary narrative. The supervening traumatic experience forces both the author and the narrator (i.e. the narrative instance) to explicate and decipher the decision-making process leading to the tragic event through a narrative medium which – from the perspective of genre theory – apparently relates to truth in an ambivalent manner. As a consequence, the even-numbered chapters of the novel make up the fictional narrative of the last day, while the odd-numbered chapters form a research diary (the style of which evokes the sober-rational language of the documentary novels). This diary helps the grandson, posing as the narrative instance, to compensate for the lack of knowledge. The zero focalization of the omniscient narrator (due to his expertise as a historian, research, and childhood experience) makes a unity (unrivalled in the history of literature) with the internal focalization of the traumatically affected grandson.

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