ABSTRACT
The narratives' cinematic zooming-ins, close-ups and montages, their surrealistic cropping-off effects and hybridisation between prosthetic artificial objects and "natural" body parts, their extensive use of abrupt, unsettling similes all point to a modernist questioning of "reality" and identity. In terms of narrative modes, representation hovers between straightforward social-realism and modernist techniques. Goodbye to Berlin's narrative has shed homogeneity and linearity to be fragmented into six short stories of various genres – two diaries framing the novel, a travelogue-like narrative and three short narratives focusing on a character or a family. Thematically and structurally, Goodbye to Berlin defies closure, as if singularities were resisting their integration into meaning or form and were meant to drift apart in an aimless centrifugal movement. In "The Nowaks," Isherwood emphasises the diverging political allegiances of the family members – a communist, a royalist, a pacifist and a Nazi all living together.
