ABSTRACT
In representing characters who care for and extend hospitality to different individuals and beings, the novels propose their own unique view on the dynamics of responsibility and reciprocity in the relations between self and other. Regardless of the eventual outcome of their characters’ practical acts of hospitality and care, all four novels present people with strategies for rethinking their vulnerability with regard to others in terms of something productive. The narrative of Netherland is recounted by the autodiegetic narrator Hans van den Broek, a Dutch equities analyst whose British wife first persuades him to relocate to New York and then, in the wake of 9/11, decides to return to London together with their young son. When Hans reminisces about his past with Chuck, it initially seems as though their relationship was aimed at nothing more than appeasing the former’s sense of purposelessness following the departure of his wife and son.
