Fatelessness Essay

Literature Over Time

Literature has been a way to express feelings and share our own experiences and points of view. However, as time goes on, some literature is forgotten and some is remembered. My question is, to what extent can the meaning of a literary work change over time?
Depending on the culture, the literary work will take different meanings over time and even if it's forgotten, works such as Fatelessness are useful to remember us about these topics. I'll base my ideas in the novel Fatelessness given that it allows me to express better the topic.

Throughout different cultures, literature has different connotations. For example, a novel like Fatelessness would have a great impact in Germany and even throughout time, people will keep remembering it because it is involved in the history of the country and in its culture. However in a country like Chile, nowadays people will appreciate the novel because its context its not old, but as time goes on, people will start forgetting the second world war because there will be news that take over the old ones. Chilean people will consider the book as something old and not relevant. The novel will probably get lost because it won't be interesting and nobody will care about it anymore. What I want to express is that depending on the country and its culture, a literary work like Fatelessness will have different variations in it's meaning over time.
This novel, independent of the culture, will mostly impact teenagers, given that the novel it's written through a first person protagonist who is a teenager. This way, teenagers will feel more identified with him. The protagonist, Gyuri, is a teenager who lives in a second world war context and lives as a jew who has to go through segregation and even go to a concentration camp in which he narrates his experiences, his hopes and his relations with people. Teenagers can see this reality through someone of the same age and realize the horrible things that happened. The lies that were told to the people who stayed there. Even our protagonist at first liked the work the nazis made him do. "The work itlsef, by the way cannot be said to be particularly strenous, and so as it is, given the gang of us boys, is fairly entertaining". We can appreciate ihs innocence as a tenn and how there were other teens living the same situation. The narrator  Gyuri, creates an effect on the readers by narrating in first person. It feels like he is telling us his experiences in such a personal way, that it makes us feel closer to Gyuri. His way of describing is quite detailed so it lets the reader imagine better the situations Guri goes through, to the point he or she feels almost inside the book. He emphasizes situations he considers important, like when he got his first kiss with AnnaMarie. "She started trembling all over. It was really good because in her terror she clung to me, her arms around my neck, her face buried in my shoulder". He is really descriptive in situations he believes important.
Day by day, the world is more globalized. People's ideas spread throughout the world, sharing social attitudes that go against discrimination and seek for a better world. Teens will in the future be teh ones who will control this global ideas, so a concept like the racial discrimination will be known to everyone as a horrible thing, so even if just a group of teens read the book, this conept will spread through people and prevail through time.

Through time some ideas start to get lost because there are some new ones that often are taken to be more important, so that is why we as a society shouldn't forget crimes like this which are provoked by racial discrimintion, The context of a novel like Fatelessness wil change through time and start being less relevant, but doesn´t mean we should forget that what happened was wrong. Forget that the racial discrimination is ont okay. The meaning of a literary work such as Fatelessness is to remind us about all this. As Imre Kertész (the author) said, the concept "continued to worry our souls, and remains in a cabinet" inside ourselves. The novel is the key for us to remember what is locked up inside that cabinet. Even if the society starts forgetting the concept, literature will try to keep remembering us.
The novel it´s an interpretation of Imre's life. It contains experiences and ideas he wanted to express. The novel itself it´s a terstimony for us to learn from. He expresses through metaphor's such as Gyuri liking the camp. This shows the little information people had about what was really going on. While Gyuri was at the concentration camp, he enjoyed being there, independant of all the starvation and hard work people had to go through. His innocence made him see it all as a "trip" to somewhere. His lack of informatino made him believe everything was okay and didn´t thought about the abuse nor the discrimination, ashe says " I would like to live a little bit longer in this beautiful concentratino camp".

Even in the future, when the context will be totally different, the meaning of literature will prevail given that if the meaning it expresses is worth keeping, it won´t be forgotten. A meaning that expresses that no race, nor culture should be superior that other. This is a concept people will remember thanks to literature. This way, literature will help avoiding such horrible crimes, like the one that Imre Kertész narrates us through the eyes of the innocent Gyuri.