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Abstract
Austerlitz (2001), written by the German author Sebald, presents a fragmented narrative with various levels of relations and symbolic plans outlined by the story of Jacques Austerlitz. This form of literary construction is in perfect harmony with the fragmentation of the past and the oblivion that shape Austerlitz. As the character’s investigations and self-discovery process advance, we find that he was one of the Jewish children brought to London by the Kindertransports on the eve of World War II. In this study, we investigate a kind of dividing line in Austerlitz’s story, establishing itself as an ‘in-between’ that evokes two considerably distinct moments of the narrative. These moments sometimes evoke imprisonment and relate to imprisoned memories, and sometimes evoke liberation and relate to freed memory. First, we track images and descriptions that refer to imprisonment when Austerlitz feels trapped, isolated, without past or memories. Subsequently, we map descriptions of this kind of liberation that begins when the character starts to redraw his past, in a process of self-discovery and reconstruction of his story and his identity. In this work, both Austerlitz and Sebald evoke the need to remember the traumatic past and witness it, despite all the pain and incomprehension while facing it.
Highlights
First published in 2001, Austerlitz, by W
Architectures of a fragmented memory. This lack of remembrances manifests, for instance, before his failure to react to the discovery of his real name and the disorientation that hits him when his memory does not associate it to any memory: Austerlitz cannot remember his past, so great is the state of imprisonment in which his memory is
According to Schmidt (1998), just as memory is inherent to the process of identitaryconstruction, the discourse produced by human beings is the instrument ofknowledge by means of which they become subjects
Summary
First published in 2001, Austerlitz, by W. In the second moment we seek to map, over the work, descriptions of this kind of liberation that begins when the character starts to discover himself, to draw his past and story again, in a process of reconstruction of his memories and of his identity, always developing, based on fragments of remembrances that were no longer present in him but in other spaces and places For this reason, Austerlitz’s interest, which flirts with obsession, and the constant references in his speech when he tells his story to the narrator invariably turn to historical descriptions of architecture and of objects, because in them his memory and his story are inscribed, though not visible. We dialogue with other questions that are part of Austerlitz and are the focus of this study, aiming at broadening the critical views on it, and, in a way, we intend to go through all the multiple possibilities of interpretation of a so fertile work
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