Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1993. [Vol. 1.] Eger Journal of American Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 21)

STUDIES - Judit Kádár: Hugh MacLennan's Complex Narrative Technique in His Last Novel

order to protect themselves (either like Conrad when joining the Gestapo to save Hanna, or like Dr. Erlich when he pretends to have a nervous breakdown). This ability to survive either physically or mentally is 'the dignity of history' as MacLennan calls it in the book, the only dignit which small everyday heroes can bear and no one else. As a group bearing this dignity he favours the example of the Jewish people who seem to fight against their thousand-year-old fate, who had the collective intellectual power to survive even the concentration camps, who have the sensitivity and common experience imprinted in their soul. Esther, a symbolic female character is the embodiment of this power in the novel. Another example of the ability to accomodate and survive as a group is the German nation. MacLennan is careful about the description of these people here. He rejects that all Germans are blind loyalists to the hostile paternal authority of their leaders, such as Siegfried and Eva Schmidt are; he rejects the 'original sin' of that nation. Searching for a psychological explanation for this massmadness he creates characters like Conrad Dehmel's father, who serves his country and ship before his family... However, the most vivid and complex character is Conrad, where the personal drives and actions explain each other throughout his life. The author's criticism is strong also when he examines the society at the end of the twentieth century and at the beginning of the twenty-first century; the world of political corruption, hypocrites, organized crime and the dangerous mass-power of the media particularly emphasized in Timothy Wellfleefs figure; the world, which goes out of control step-by-step, day-byday in front of our eyes. Looking for the causes which lead up to the present (here: the writer's actual present time) situation MacLennan found the historical analogies to be eternal, everlasting and reoccuring. In his eyes society tends towards chaos. Similar feeling, fear and philosophy is in the focus of the American entropic fiction of the 1960—1970s, the fear of the rising chaos; the annihilation of human life and relations; the growing force of powers like the mass media that can keep individual dreams and desires under control, or the bureaucracy that kills all the possibilities of individual action. MacLennan does not really reach philosophical depths and theories as far as the explanation and presentation of the process of human affairs is 66