This thesis examines the themes of suicide in texts pertaining to life-writing. To do so, it analyses the novels The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath that could be categorised as autofiction and Charlotte by David Foenkinos, where the author approaches life-writing in a different manner, as he novelises the autobiographical Gesamtkunstwerk Leben? Oder Theater? (Life? Or Theatre?) by Charlotte Salomon, a German-Jewish painter that died in Auschwitz in 1943 as a victim of the Holocaust. To gain a better understanding of the two texts, the thesis first tries to clarify the theoretical aspect of life-writing and autobiography as qualified in the works of Philippe Lejeune, Paul de Man, Marko Juvan and Andrea Zlatar Violić. Furthermore, it also interrogates the theory of literariness, identity and identification as examined by Jonathan Culler. Finally, it shortly analyses the presence and impact of suicide in literature and tries to clarify the problematic of premonition as well as the question of how a literary subject might be marked by suicide in the wider context, all through the prism of Grigory Chkhartishvili’s work.
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