On the Creative Evolution of Modern Literature:Reading Austerlitz

Abstract

This paper is an analytic exploration of W. G. Sebald’s only full-length novel, Austerlitz; a reading to faithfully follow the narrative aspect that goes against the grain of Holocaust testimonial literature. If Sebald has gone beyond testimony to the point of interrogating the Western colonial modernity, then the perusal of Austerlitz must be a great challenge. The narrative, centered around the first-person speaker believed to be Sebald with his attendant eponymous character, Austerlitz, relentlessly reinforces the awareness that the Holocaust is a phenomenon that originated from the Western spirit rooted in the Descartean rationalism. Thus Austerlitz can be re-evaluated as a critique of the fundamental logic of Western modernity and also an attempt to heal its disastrous aftermath. In this vein, Austerlitz is remarkably suffused with architectural meditations; the highly concentrated thoughts on various monumental buildings in countries that once ruled as colonial empires, such as the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and France, lead to criticism of the origin of Auschwitz. Hence the analysis is focused on the world-view of the Western colonial modernity that perpetrated ‘the Shoah’ in an unprecedented and unparalleled enormity. The upshot of this paper; the narrative of Austerlitz with his first-person narrator remains an outstanding example of the creative evolution in the field of modern literature today.