The metafictional depiction of burial in Son of Saul

Abstract

ABSTRACT Critics have noted that the Hungarian Holocaust film, Son of Saul (2015), draws on Sophocles’ Antigone in its depiction of burial. In this paper, this depiction is shown to be rigorously metafictional, based on how it recasts Antigone’s mission and rewrites Holocaust discourse on the Sonderkommando. I argue that the film’s metafictional depiction of burial takes Antigone’s ethical stance on dehumanization forward by shifting the focus from kinship to the otherness of death. The inaccessibility of death, a fundamental feature of Holocaust discourse, is communicated via a metafictional device known as the implied viewer. That said, the co-implication of death and fiction exceeds the use of metafictional conventions. For the focus on inaccessibility underscores that death is a reality that can only be imagined, not experienced as such. The fictiveness that lines our relation to death is analyzed in the light of Jacques Derrida’s discourse on death and burial, which stresses the animality of mortals (their inability to know death).The animality that drives burial is what enables the film to give dehumanization another ethical dimension.