The duality of Holocaust literature

Type :

Book review

Pages :

6 pages

Format :

.doc

Published date :

03/18/2009

Category :

Philosophy & literature

Sub category :

Literature

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Summary :

Introduction.
Analysis of Boris as a character.
Dual representations of characters.
The self-awareness of the use of mirroring.
Motifs that proliferate in doubles.
The double story in Blood from the Sky.
Conclusion.
Works cited.

Abstract

Other than the odd revisionist, the vast majority of sentient humans will attest to the horror that was the holocaust. Unfortunately, those who can give first hand testimonies are few in number and quickly disappearing. The story gets even more muddled when psychologists protest that memory is entirely subjective, rendering their accounts unreliable. In order to overcome the difficulty of presenting honest memory, Georges Perec and Piotr Rawicz both turned to representative fiction to tell their tales of holocaust survival. W, or The Memory of Childhood and Blood from the Sky are their stories as though reflected but distorted in a fun house mirror, with "bifurcations, endless bifurcations..." (Rawicz 194) pervading throughout. Both novels are deeply infused with mirroring of people, images, and ideas that are used in a variety of ways but serve the same larger purpose. With this deliberate exercise of duality, Perec and Rawicz address the problem of representing the holocaust by using "the mirror" to turn fact into fiction thereby rendering the inexpressible into an expressible form.