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

also think of the choice of characters like Canaris, Heinrich, Einstein or Goebbels, obvious figures since they transfer the message for us too directly in their personality. They stand for themselves, for only one basic idea, as well as the other group of characters, namely women (eg. Esther Stahr, Hanna Erlich or Eva Schmidt) who stand for the traditional virtues and vices, the Jewish sensibility, tolerance, etc., or the aggressive woman figure, who blindly follows the Nazist ideas. None of these female characters are powerful enough since they are not so much individuals as representatives of a group of people. MacLennan's style can also be described as one of symbolic nature. Let me just mention an example, the Icaros-motifs for instance, when he writes about the girls and boys who sailed into the sun and burned to death (VT 15). Here the image may stand for the lost generation, who were outsiders of the bureaucracy, who searched for their ego and place in the world, and ended up in an 'intellectual nowhere'. We could also mention the birds in the Old City (VT 20) as the topos for freedom or another interesting image, when he speaks about Ulm as the heart blasted city (VT 278). Perhaps one can make a parallel between the Dutch city of Rotterdam and MacLennan's Ulm. In the heart of Rotterdam, which was destroyed during World War II, there stands a statue with its heart torn out. Although the writer denied the connection with any futuristic writings when talking about his style, some interesting similarities with Orwell's style seem worth mentioning. First of all, the narrative aspect and the basic standpoint of the protagonist, John Wellfleet, is similar to the one's in Orwell's 1984. Both see and show the events with the eyes of a survivor after a tragic turningpoint of the civilization. In both cases, another person, an outsider, comes (in Orwell's novel the girl, and here André). They open up the closed personality of the main figure (as MacLennan writes: "It almost makes me feel human again." (VT 15). Their common problem was that they did not fit into the system, and as renegated people they took up the fight against the inhuman forces. As far as narration in the two books is concerned, the time aspects are widened and this broad overview gives a new perspective to explore the present. Moreover, the naturalism of the images about the 71