Abstract
In this chapter the author investigates the significance of the metafictional mode, which is used in a number of perpetrator narratives. Understanding metafiction to incorporate the text’s own self-awareness and the subsequent awareness of the reader as he or she responds to that text, the author argues that this technique necessitates the reader’s continual navigation between the ‘story world’ and the ‘real’ one. The texts thereby force the reader to continually renegotiate his or her relationship to the novel, and to the characters therein. By consequence, identification with the perpetrators of the Holocaust is continually disrupted, denying the possibility of straightforward empathetic responses and encoding a need for these literary encounters to remain reflective.
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Notes
- 1.
It is of significance that Wasserman is described as a kind of inverted Scheherazade: ‘tell me a story and stay alive’ (206). The inversion occurs because, as Wasserman indicates, ‘what applies to Scheherazade does not apply to me, for the simple reason that the same lovely maiden wished very much to live, which was why she told the sultan her stories, whereas I, on the contrary, wish very much to die, heaven forbid’ (208).
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Pettitt, J. (2017). Drawing the Reader into the Narrative. In: Perpetrators in Holocaust Narratives. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52575-4_4
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