Wandering to Dwell: Heidegger and the Phenomenology of Dwelling in Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn

This essay seeks to emphasize the interconnections between wandering and dwelling in the context of Sebald’s ambulatory narrative, The Rings of Saturn (1998). By using Heidegger’s notion of “dwelling,” it seeks to highlight the ways in which wandering, with its origin in the ancient human desire for movement and which seems to negate the impulse to dwell or be emplaced in a fixed location, not only transmutes in the contemporary consciousness into an alternative mode of dwelling but also leads to its actualization.