Five decades after the event, portraying the Holocaust continues to be a precarious and controversial endeavor. The overall posture of Holocaust representation has been to underline the nonsensical and destructive nature of the event as it extends into the post-Holocaust generation's collective memory. While traditional representations of Jewish catastrophe have relied on ancient Biblical and non-biblical archetypes, originating with Adam's fall from God's grace and mankind's eventual restitution from his fall to be delivered in messianic time, Holocaust narratives have in general not carried a message of redemption, nor have they offered any closure to the event.
Not only does Anne Michaels' Fugitive Pieces render a transformative narrative, but the closure in Part I of the novel reaches a level of redemption. This work addresses the problems with the restorative nature of the novel through untangling the dense metaphors, the plot structure and characterization, and by drawing on survivor accounts, psychoanalysis, historiography and literary criticism. I look closely at how Jakob recovers his past, reaches redemption, and how he ultimately comes through the trauma of the Holocaust while remaining on the edges of the event. Likewise, I discuss how the tenuousness of Ben's potential recovery from the transmitted past of his parents deconstructs the restorative closure offered in Jakob's story. That the novel is structured into two parts is significant to my reading; this work shows how the first part of the novel with its rich, lyrical discourse and fulfilling outcome is complicated by the second part which is notably less poetic and does not culminate in explicit restoration. This thesis demonstrates how the novel's parts complement each other, structurally forming a unified story that ultimately offers no real closure. I suggest a possible solution to the problem of redemption in Fugitive Pieces by reading Jakob's story as a myth based on the traditional Judaic archetypal\ restitution and Ben's story as an interpretation of the actual experience of the post-Holocaust '
generation. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:mcmaster.ca/oai:macsphere.mcmaster.ca:11375/15709 |
| Date | 08 1900 |
| Creators | Oshman, Geraldine D. |
| Contributors | Hyman, Dr. Roger L., English |
| Source Sets | McMaster University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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