Reading for Narrative Truth through the Absence of Narrative Awareness in Wilkomirski’s Fragments

This article analyzes the false Holocaust memoir, Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood by Binjamin Wilkomirski, as a case study in autobiographical truth. The author proposes close reading as a means to detect contradictions within the text and argues for a reevaluation of the pop-cultural attachment to authorial claims of factuality in autobiography.