The Identity and Psychology of Lars Andemening and Cynthia Ozick
The Holocaust of Lars Andemening and Cynthia Ozick There is a glorious ambiguity to Cynthia Ozick’s The Messiah of Stockholm, one that naturally encourages a variety of interpretations and understandings. It’s a text that at once is about religion, literature, the Holocaust, identity, and more – something worthy of a comprehensive overhaul and a critical eye. Cynthia Ozick uses Lars’ psychological shifts and precarious mental state to speak to a variety of elements; but she does this in a way that renders the oscillations Lars’ experiences into the surrounding environment. This sort of externalization of Lars’ psychology is integral to the novel, and it is through this externalization that Ozick makes her various points regarding the aforementioned topics in the post-Holocaust world; Lars’ struggle for identity, then, is the medium through which Ozick speaks. If we examine the externalized factors within the novel, and read the hidden language Ozick seeks to embed within the dialogue and narration, we can reach an understanding of the novel that clears up all ambiguities: that Ozick is not arguing for any particular subject so much as she is arguing for a passionate negation of everything that detracts from historical reality. Ozick, like Lars, seeks to hoist something up to the stage of the world; but it is not literature, nor is it religion – it is the Holocaust. From the outset of the novel, Cynthia Ozick frames the novel in a way that calls attention to Lars’ identity. She does this by explicitly detailing his past; his marriages with Birgitta and Ulrika, his relationship with his daughter, and how “he had behind him much of the ordinary bourgeois predicament, and had lost it not through intention but through attrition” (Ozick 4). His former life as a family man is emphasized early on so as to contextualize Lars’ newfangled existence as a devoted belles-lettrist. We thus come to understand that Lars is, in essence, searching for a stable identity, one that
Cited: "Maria Gripe Har Avlidit." SvD.se. SvD Nyheter, 5th Apr. 2007. Web. 25 Apr. 2013. <http://www.svd.se/nyheter/inrikes/maria-gripe-har-avlidit_215691.svd>. Ozick, Cynthia. The Messiah of Stockholm: A Novel. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1987. Print.