A Limbo Between Beckett and Kafka: The Tartar Steppe

Abstract

ABSTRACT The Tartar Steppe, Dino Buzzati’s most famous work, is not simply a narrative account of an officer serving in a remote fortress overlooking a vast northern desert; it oscillates between the chronicle and fantastic realism throughout. Anguish and malaise are expressed in the narrative in a manner similar to existentialist philosophy and Kafka’s fiction. Based upon the comparison to his Masters, I will attempt at reinterpreting Buzzati’s novel as a journey to the afterlife, as a transcendental roaming to a spiritual limbo where all objects, people, and landscapes are but individual projections.