NUK - logo
Faculty of Arts, Lj. - all departments (FFLJ)
  • Illumination of solitude : accessing the past: magical realist tendencies in Everything is illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer : (comparison to One hundred years of solitude by Gabriel García Márquez) = Razsvetljenje samote : iskanje preteklosti: magični realizem v romanu Jonathana Safrana Foerja Vse je razsvetljeno : (primerjava z romanom Sto let samote Gabriela García Márqueza) : diplomsko delo
    Grčar, Mina
    Everything is Illuminated, the debut novel by Jonathan Safran Foer, has been acclaimed for its experimental form employed to convey his tragic family past, embittered by the shadow of the Holocaust. ... Foer's turn to fictionalization and magical realism seems to evoke One Hundred Years of Solitude, the world literature masterpiece by the Colombian Nobel Laureate Gabriel García Márquez. In their respective novels, each of the two authors tries to express past issues, which makes the reader feel their choice of the magical realist mode could not have been a coincidence. The purpose of the following literary analysis is to ʺilluminateʺ the reasons for the two authors, writing within different cultural contexts and in different spirits of the era, to opt for such a style. One can sense that Foer's novel is charged with the difficult and painful topic of the Holocaust and that García Márquez is trying to express the cruel colonial history of Colombia in a somewhat less direct way. As the paper will point out in the following chapters, traumatic experiences of any kind, either the experience of colonial rule, repression and forceful conversion to the culture of the colonizers, or the trauma of totalitarian regimes and war, all prove problematic to transcribe due to the inexpressibility of the horrific truth behind them. Due to the limitations of language to describe them, as well as the temporal distance or suppression of truth and historical facts, the collective memory of the past is often ruptured, not clear or even completely unknown to younger generations. The latter hence struggle to reconstruct their families' and their peoples' forgotten histories within a particular cultural environment. Authors retreat to magical realism to show the multilayered nature of truth and human memory. While the absolute, single variant of truth is unattainable, impossible to grasp and to be shed light upon, magical realism, with its narrative possibilities, is able to capture the emotional essence associated with the times gone by. This literary issue is of particular urgency with regards to the Holocaust, which was an experience so terrible it defies expression through ordinary language. Another reason for the novel to take the magical realist form is the unknowability of the past. Fictionalizing the story of the Holocaust and infusing it with elements of superstition, exaggeration and the extraordinary thus provide the author with the means to express the inexpressible. Everything is Illuminated presents an alternative version of Foer's family history, blending the styles and techniques of the great magical realist authors like Günter Grass, Salman Rushdie, Toni Morrison, Maxine Hong Kingston and above all, Gabriel García Márquez. The influence of the latter is evident in the style, the motifs and symbols and the settings of the narratives, while the strongest similarity between the two novels is the content that resists realist description, namely the repression under the colonial rule and the terror of totalitarian regimes in Colombian history or the horrific violence performed by the Nazis during WWII. By rejecting the concept of a singular version of historical truth, acknowledging a multiplicity of possible perspectives, presenting a cyclical concept of history and the absence of any real difference between truth and fiction, magical realist texts allow for mythologized accounts and dreams to assume a position equally valid to the conventionally real. In his family saga, Foer reshapes the events, from the birth of his ancestry to the bombing of Trachimbrod, inflating the narrative with what seems too implausible or extraordinary to have actually happened. This authorial move is to point to the fact that history is always multilayered and can never be fully ʺilluminatedʺ or viewed from a single perspective if one wants to see the larger picture and feel the memories breathing from behind the veils of the past.
    Type of material - undergraduate thesis ; adult, serious
    Publication and manufacture - Ljubljana : [M. Grčar], 2015
    Language - english
    COBISS.SI-ID - 57955682

Call number – location, accession no. ... Copy status Reservation
OHK - Germanistika
 SKL-DiplA GRČAR M. Illumination OHK - Germanistika
 SKL-DiplA GRČAR M. Illumination 		available - reading room
loading ...
loading ...
loading ...

Shelf entry