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Transformations of Existence, or Ways of Restoring Identity in Andrzej Stasiuk's Fiction (The Walls of Hebron and the White Raven)

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Przybylska A.

Ruch Literacki

2005

vol. 46

issue 6(273)

621-632

The 'imprisonment syndrom' is a prominent feature of Andrzej Stasiuk's 'One Night's Story' (from 'The Walls of Hebron and The White Raven'). The main character of the short story serves his prison sentence, the other suffers from debilitating monotony and routine. As their lives are increasingly weighed down by an inescapable sense of confinement, their existence seems to illustrate Hannah Arendt's philosophical truth: what enslaves me also creates me. They accept their enslavement (as it is easier to stay in prison than to stand up to the world) or escape into bodily physicality (the identity of their bodies allows them a distinctness from the mainstream of life) and create their own conventions and rites. Accustomed to repetition, they live on the margins of society. There they build their hermetically closed worlds which confer them their identity. Exposed and out of their depth, they fall back on a mythic frame of reference, which appears to justify their existence. They incorporate the idea of incompleteness; their fate is an example of the privatization of lives, the effect of existential 'tinkering' (or the application of Levi-Strauss' bricolage). They live their lives between the poles of selfdefinition, autocreation and the evasion of responsibility.

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Transformations of Existence, or Ways of Restoring Identity in Andrzej Stasiuk's Fiction (The Walls of Hebron and the White Raven)