Feb
19
Fatelessness reads the memoir of a Hungarian teenager, describing just one year of his life. While living in Budapest with his family our narrator is proud, but silent. He speaks with a voice much like Camus's, in that he detachedly, though acutely observes others as if their actions hardly relate to his own. He finds contentment in being a naïve youth whose decisions are made for him. Over the next year, this slowly changes after he is put to work in a German Arbeitslager, or concentration camp. Although he doesn't know why he was taken to the camp, he accepts passively his fate and does what would be natural for us all: to acknowledge the situation and to simply survive each passing day. It is in captivity that he expands his emotions and develops his sense of self, maturing in a place where the idea of an individual does not exist. In the camp, nearly all identifying characteristics are stripped away from the internees, leaving behind only their language and faith. Using these two attributes, he reflects on his own Jewish identity, as well as religion as a whole. After observing the Nazis' efficacy with some admiration, he ultimately rejects all religious faith for lacking rationality. He finds the man who tries to preserve his faith in spite of the hardships of the concentration camp to be foolish and, above all, stubborn.
Just when things look their lowest, the aroma of turnip soup triggers our narrator's desire to live. It is at this moment that he realizes his personhood and sheds his skepticism of individuality. But with this awareness comes bitterness and a revised existentialism. Even though he lives someone else's fate, he reconciles the poor luck of others by explaining that fate is independent of personal action.
By the end of our story, our narrator speaks with an adult air of authority earned from his experience. For him, only fate or freedom can exist, never both. He finds no difference between doing nothing and doing something, as both have equally unpredictable and unchangeable outcomes. However, the idea that history happens around people, tossing them every which way without reason, disgusts him. The agency people inherently lack ought to be made up for in their tolerance of the past and of what's to come. The moral he sermonizes is, for him, not a choice but a necessity; it is to take life one step at a time.
Fatelessness was written by the Nobel Prize recipient and Hungarian writer Imre Kertész.
