Representing and remembering the holocaust in postmodern fiction : instances of the unpresentable in Martin Amis's 'Time's arrow' and W.G. Sebald's 'Austerlitz'

Abstract

Using the novels Time's Arrow by Mythology and Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald as instances of postmodernist Holocaust fiction, this dissertation seeks to show that these texts present the Holocaust as one example of that which eludes representation. It also analyses the importance of memory in bringing out the relation between the historical past and present consciousness. The introduction presents an overview of the critical voices that have addressed the problem of the literary representation of the Holocaust as well as the theoretical dimension to postmodern narrative strategies in order to provide a framework for this study. The first chapter analyses Martin Amis's Time's Arrow, arguing that its unconventional narrative techniques reflect the irrationality of the Holocaust itself, and that the tension between memory and forgetting as presented in the novel foregrounds the author's concern with preserving the past in cultural memory. Then, the second chapter discusses how the themes of memory and forgetting in W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz are related to the concept of postmemory as developed by Marianne Hirsch, and argues that the author's mode of representation calls attention to the Holocaust as an instance of the 'unpresentable'. This study concludes by arguing that Amis and Sebald's literary styles bring to the fore the challenge that the Holocaust poses to representation and to comprehension and attest to the difficulty of reproducing deeply traumatic realities. In so doing, they show that the Holocaust exposes fiction's concerns about the limits of rendering the 'unpresentable'.