Abstract
Amis has always found the question of the Holocaust’s exceptionalism fascinating and returns to the subject in “The Zone of Interest”. After analysing how the enormity of the Holocaust conditions literary representation and Amis’s own approach to it, this article focuses on one of the main voices of the novel, Szmul, the leader of the Sonderkommando, whose members were Jewish prisoners forced to clean the gas chambers and dispose of the bodies. Through him we confront directly the horrors of the Holocaust. One of Amis’ greatest achievements is precisely that he humanizes and rehabilitates the figure of the Sonder by transforming Szmul into a comic hero who, in spite of the atrocities he witnesses, reaffirms the unconditional value of life and fights to give meaning to his terrible predicament. The novel is dedicated to the writer and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi, whose voice can be heard throughout the text.
Highlights
Szmul into a comic hero who, in spite of the atrocities he witnesses, reaffirms the unconditional value of life and fights to give meaning to his terrible predicament
The novel is dedicated to the writer and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi, whose voice can be heard throughout the text
In “Symptoms of Discursivity” Ernst van Alphen argues that Holocaust survivors are incapable of narrating their past experiences because they lack an appropriate discourse to describe the horrors they have been through: “[T]he problem for Holocaust survivors is precisely that the lived events could not be experienced because language did not provide the terms and positions in which to experience them, they are defined as traumatic” (1999: 27)
Summary
Szmul into a comic hero who, in spite of the atrocities he witnesses, reaffirms the unconditional value of life and fights to give meaning to his terrible predicament. Amis’s emphasis on his use of realism to represent the Shoah is certainly significant, since Epstein, the author of the well-known Holocaust novel King of the Jews (1979), argues that Holocaust fiction should show “what life in the ghettos and camps was really like -that is, reproducing, re-creating, restoring to life, in such a way that the reader feels a sense of connectedness, not dispassion and distance, least of all horror and repugnance, to the events and the characters that, Lazarus-like are called back from the dead” (1988: 264-5).
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