ABSTRACT
Marek Hlasko and Desmond Hogan consider the concept and the experience of exile at an individual rather than a political and historical level. In their fiction, exile expresses feelings of cultural and existential loss, of misplacement, isolation, and solitude in making moral choices. Both authors show the individual as a fragile, conscious and moral being, whose estrangement is dictated by internal imperatives as well as by historical and political forces. The role of Hlasko's and Hogan's characters as 'uncreators' also functions within a socio-political dimension: their distrust in the 'system' or community, and the ideology or ethical code it represents, puts them in the position of being traitors and enemies of the order by whose principles society functions. In Hogan's fiction the inability to love seems to be correlated with the issue of personal and national identity. The experience of exile in the fictions of both Hogan and Hlasko problematizes the idea of home and homeland.
