Situating the Self in Historical Narratives: "Narrative" and "Larval" Subjects in Uwe Timm's Am Beispiel meines Bruders and Christoph Hein's Landnahme

This essay examines the ways in which two contemporary German texts, Uwe Timm's Am Beispiel meines Bruders and Christoph Hein's Landnahme, situate silent characters at the centre of world-historical events of the twentieth century. These novels employ multi-perspectival and relational modes of narration to foreground the collaborative effort of narrating such central characters and thus the histories they represent. To investigate these silent characters and the relational mode of narration employed to construct them, I turn to two complementary theories of the self. The first is Paul Ricoeur's concept of narrative identity, which conjectures that we each employ the "I" to synthesize the events of a lifetime into narrative form in order to conceive of something called the self that is stable and distinct from others. The second is Gilles Deleuze's concept of the larval subject, which posits that the self is not something essential but, rather, metamorphic, unfixed, and always undergoing a process of becoming through encounters with difference. I argue that these opposing concepts of the self—the Ricoeurian narrative self that seeks synthesis of its various parts and the Deleuzian larval self that resists synthesis and foregrounds difference—help us understand the function of these protagonists who are situated as the empty, unknowable centres around which the events, narrators, and other characters of the novels are organized, as well as the collaborative mode of narration employed by these novels to treat the events of the twentieth century.