Initiatory Narrative and Trauma of Deportation in Gerold Belger's Novel “The House of Wandering”

This study focuses on an analysis of Gerold Belger’s novel “ The House of Wandering ”, specifically examining its initiatory narrative and deportation discourse. The primary objective is to reconstruct the phase structure of the text and describe mechanisms for forming hybrid identity. Using a work with autobiographical underpinnings as research material, structural and hermeneutic analyses are applied. The transformation of rites of passage motifs due to traumatic experience within the fictional context is explored. A comparison between the compositional structure of the novel and the classical cultural philosophy triad — “separation,” “liminality,” and “incorporation” — is conducted. It is noted that by the conclusion of the novel, the protagonist integrates into a new legal and linguistic-cultural order, while liminality undergoes transformation, becoming prolonged. The macro-level transition is modeled through the compositional triad “David-Hristian-Harry.” Within these parts, mini-triades are reconstructed. Threshold chronotopes such as roads, commissions, and special commandants’ offices, along with onomastic and legal markers of status like renamings and passports, are interpreted as textual representations of social rituals of exclusion and recognition. The functioning of the “house” as a semiotic center of integration is demonstrated, and the concept of “return through language” translates lived experiences from communicative memory into cultural memory

Deportation · Liminality · Narrative · Narratology · Semiotics · Memory, History, Trauma, Identity · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration · Narrative Theory and Analysis

• The Generation of Postmemory

  Marianne Hirsch•The Generation of Postmemory•2012

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