ABSTRACT
Chapter 6 examines Bohumil Hrabal’s transformative approach to writing in his essays and autofictions. Despite writing about himself and speaking in his own name rather than through narrators and literary characters as in his literary fictions, Hrabal subtly manipulates his self-image through typically literary techniques like retardation, regulated contrasts, and carefully repeated motifs. Similarly to Kundera’s essays, Hrabal’s essayistic and autofictional texts frequently shift the perspective, interrupt the author’s line of reasoning, and leave inconsistencies in his arguments. But unlike Kundera, Hrabal twists facts, stylizes himself into different roles, and relates events from his life with a hefty dose of imagination. In this respect he is closer to Gombrowicz’s autobiographical writings. Yet unlike Gombrowicz, who strives to unsettle himself and the reader, Hrabal’s self-stylizations are a means of attuning himself to his immediate circumstances. The various identities and positions that he assumes allow him to reflect in a more sustained fashion on who he is vis-à-vis his changing environment, has been, and wants to be, thereby affecting who he becomes. This transformative self-shaping extends to the reader. Hrabal’s essays and autofictions produce highly individual readerly experiences that fuel readers’ own practices of strategic adaption to their circumstances.
