Portrayal of holocaust experience in Michael Chabon’s The Final Solution

Abstract

The present paper highlights how Michael Chabon’s novel The Final Solution focuses on the Holocaust Experience in the twenty-first century American Literature. The Holocaust is known as the Shoah was the genocide of European Jews during World War II between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany. Its collaborators systematically murdered six million Jews across German occupied Europe around two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population. The segregation of Jews in ghettos culminated in the policy of extermination the Nazis called the Final Solution to the Jewish Question. The title of the novel refer Doyle's Sherlock Holmes story "The Final Problem" in which Holmes confronts his greatest enemy, Professor Moriarty, at Reichenbach Falls. The Final Solution is the Nazis' plan for the genocide of the Jewish people, as well as The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, a 1974 novel written in homage to Conan Doyle by Nicholas Meyer. However, The Final Solution supplements and complicates the standard interpretation of the novel as an exercise in Holocaust piety by focusing on an “impious” subtext that appears to contradict some of the text’s more overt assumptions.