ABSTRACT
The fictional clearly carries autobiographical elements, while the autobiographical often straddles the boundary between reality and fiction. The tales of fractures and injuries were part of the child's attempt to establish a coherent sequence, to rehabilitate the thinking apparatus which was under constant attack by the arbitrariness of the experienced reality and which lacked the discursive access that could endow it with meaning. The narrator demands that the reader will be an active witness – in contrast to the passive witness he himself chooses to be – so as to create, on behalf of him, an act of integration. Just as he borrows the memories of others, so he borrows the reader's ability to connect, in order to stitch together what he himself cannot make into one piece. One of the most difficult tasks in bearing witness to trauma is, indeed, that of discerning between personal and general history.
