Displacing the Self in Fiction

Two World Wars, the rise of dictatorships and totalitarianism, the Holocaust, Hiroshima and the Cold War profoundly affected the notion of identity in the second half of the twentieth century. This book takes Agota Kristov's trilogy and Thomas Bernhard's 'Correction' as paradigmatic cases to investigate the literary representations of physical and existential displacement. A closer look at the biographies of these two authors sheds light on their different experiences as displaced beings. Their protagonists, lost in a fictional world in which no spatial or temporal references are respected, also write to reassert themselves. However, language reveals its inability to capture any true version of the self. Both works merge autobiography and fiction to challenge the notion of truth. This analysis should be especially of use to scholars seeking to explore the link between these two authors, which so far has been largely ignored by scholars, or generally to anyone interested in the theme of exile and its literary representation.