Creativity and Nonconformity in Monika Maron's Die Überläuferin

Maron's novel Die Überläuferin represents the disintegration and regeneration of an individual's sense of identity. The narrative traces the process by which its heroine breaks free from her conformist ways of thinking and acknowledges her most feared desires. Fantasy is depicted as a means for recognizing and discarding an authoritarian society's underlying utilitarian principles that can confine and paralyze an individual. The article analyzes the images of walls, death, and rebirth as well as the function of fantasy and memory to demonstrate the destabilizing and self-emancipatory effects of creative action. (SCA)