“Not an Innocent Enterprise” The Narrator’s Transition from Voyeur to Victim in W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz

Date

2008-12-15T16:42:45Z

Authors

Eaheart, Martha Bass

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Abstract

W.G. Sebald said that Austerlitz was a sequel to The Emigrants. But if Austerlitz is a sequel to The Emigrants, it is one in which Sebald has attempted, by creating a Bildungsroman, making extensive use of allegory, and establishing a close relationship between the narrator and the protagonist, to change the perspective of the narrator so that, it not only is no longer that of a voyeur who has been caught looking and thus become “the object of the gaze of the other,” but, through the narrator’s strong identification with “the other,” it becomes the perspective of a Holocaust victim.

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Keywords

W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz, Holocaust, Good German, Other in literature

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