Kerrice Lawrence Essays - Literature, Film, Fugitive Pieces, Culture

Kerrice Lawrence Dr. Gayle Thrift IDST 400-1 The Role of Language and Poetic Devices in Fugitive Pieces by Ann Michaels Fugitive Pieces from the onset is undoubtedly a thrilling fiction novel. The author Anne Michaels has successfully employed first person narration and use of metaphor to illustrate events that would not be achieved by any other style. Clearly, this is a nov el that tries, through literary devices to reconstruct the experiences that survivors of the holocaust underwent. It defies earlier propositions put forth by Adorno in the Prisms , that no one should write poetry on the Auschwitz accounts as it would result in barbarism (Almon, 47) . B y virtue of this, it is clear that Fugitive Pieces is intended to portray a picture that it is possible for survivors to live with their traumatizing memories of their past, with their memories of having escaped death narrowly and still continue to live normal lives (Skog, 201). Through constant memory of the narrator, Jakob, about his family and especially his sister Bella, the author successfully delivers her messa ge that there is hope for humanity to l ive by faith and po rtray the effects that the H olocaust had on the populations that were affected. Every narrative can be thought of as a mysterious na rra tive because as Ann Michae ls has said through her character, Athos in Fugitive Pieces , "There's nothing that a man will not do to another , nothing tha t a man will not do for another " (114). The motives and intentions of a human being are complex and difficult to sort out. Their behavior could be motivated by a spontaneous feeling or by years of mulling over an injustice they feel they have to readdress. Perhaps something as simple as a rain storm can motivate an act of kindness or an act of violence. The environmental atmo sphere of a behavior may be as important as the inner workings of the human brain. For example if the environment is a concentration camp or a Nazi SS unit who can say what moves a person t o act for the good or the bad; at least there is no way to be sure with one hundred p ercent certainty. Even the person who is doing the behavior cannot necessarily be su re of why they behaved in this or that way at exactly noon on Friday in the year of 1943. Fugitive Piece s is a mostly beautifully written examination of the human condition with the traumatic events of World War II in Europe and the H olocaust in Germany acting, I would say , as main ch aracters in the book along with the human characters. Athos , a Greek archaeologist , encounters a "bog boy" when closing down a German archaeology site before return ing to Greece (Michaels, 5). The "bog boy " had become a boy of the bog because his parents and beloved sister had been s tolen from him by Nazi soldiers (Michaels, 5). The boy had hidden in a secret place in the house to avoid interaction with the Nazis. Then he became an organic part of the forest in order to survive while hiding from the Nazis outside of his r uined home. This paper argues t hat Athos, the savior of the seven year old forest boy named Jakob , is the conscience of the world. In other words Athos embodies the shock, the shame, the fear, the failures and the successes the world experienced while tryi ng to understand the horrifying legacy of WWII. Jacob's experience as a survivor mirrors the experiences and feelings of other survivors of s uch traumatic events using the H olocaust as the example. The hypothesis is that Jakob follows a path to sanity although the odds were certainly stacked against him. Michaels is expressing a way to retain o ptimism in the face of despair by describing the reaction to trauma as a universal behavior (Caruth as cited by Aloui, 10) . This paper follows the jo urney that Jakob travels with Athos in the first part of the book. The most meaningful and moving part of Fugitive Pieces