ABSTRACT
Agota Kristof's novel The Notebook follows the experiences of a pair of twins who, during an unspecified war, are left in the care of their grandmother whom they haven't met until then. The Notebook consists of the twins' jointly written diary. The fact that the act of persecution and the act of rescue might take place in the same spot and featured by the same protagonist creates a kind of "schizophrenogenic double-bind" quite at the beginning of the plot. The twins' sado-masochistic relations with the military officer are described in a similar vein. In exchange for sexual services rendered, they are allowed to be in his room, to eat, to smoke and to listen to music. In terms of the function of the inner witness it seems that the post-traumatic dyad created by the twins was the result of an excess of primary violence along with the absence of a concrete or internalized third.
