Andrić, Ivo | Felicity Rosslyn (essay date 1989)
Felicity Rosslyn (essay date 1989)
SOURCE: "The Short Stories of Ivo Andrić: Autobiography and the Chain of Proof," in The Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 67, No. 1, January, 1989, pp. 29-41.
[In the following essay, Rosslyn emphasizes the importance of testimony and truth in Andrić's short fiction.]
In most of Andrić's stories a character experiences some kind of agonizing constraint, whether from physical causes, like disease or old age, or metaphysical ones, like guilt. The character chokes on his or her sensations, and the reader chokes in sympathy—for no one is better than Andrić at arousing the feelings he describes. Some of the stories are positively unpleasant to read, in consequence, and perhaps none of them is more strikingly unpleasant than 'Autobiography', where the narrator of the story (a kindly literary figure hardly to be distinguished from Andrić himself) goes through a series of tortured emotions from an...
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