My master’s thesis is focused on some short stories of Antonio Tabucchi, one of the best Italian writers of the last decades. The main purpose of my work was to show that in the short stories examined, which are bound up with the concepts of loneliness, guilt and remorse, children cope with guilt differently from adults. Furthermore, I aimed to show that guilt is never explicitly defined but manifests itself through other phenomena such as the concept of unsaid, ambiguity as well as the space-time dimension in which the characters find themselves.
According to my research, all the protagonists of the examined short stories find themselves in a reality too painful to be accepted, therefore they take refuge in the past, which, although unreliable because it has been filtered through imagination or incomplete memories, still seems more reassuring. While adult characters express the need to look back and confront their past (in some cases trying to confess their mistakes or sins in order to receive acquittal and to free themselves from the moral burden they carry), child characters, on the other hand, on whom the guilt has been transmitted by the previous generation, desperately try to protect themselves and take revenge for the evil they have to endure.
In addition to bringing out malaise related to the guilt of the characters in his short stories, Tabucchi uses different narratives and rhetorical strategies. Thus, the well-being of the characters is changing in accordance with space (the inside-outside contrast) and time (the contrast between a cruel life in the present and a happy life in the past). At the rhetorical level, beside the repetition of word sequences as an expression of a communication blockade, the use of the omission strategy and silence is common in order to allow the characters to escape from everything that invades their souls.
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