Becoming Fiction

Becoming Fiction: Reassessing Atheism in Drrenmatts Stoffe sets forth a clarification of the importance of Friedrich Drrenmatt, modern Swiss dramatist, essayist, novelist and self-proclaimed atheist (19211990), and offers new insights into the ways in which his fathers vocation as a Protestant minister, along with Drrenmatts own decision as a young man to pursue a career in writing rather than religion, shaped his world view and, in particular, made necessary a final, desperate attempt to fictionally recast his own life through revisions and amplifications of many of his earlier works when he created his final prose volume, Stoffe. Drrenmatt devoted immense energy in his writings to wrestling with his fathers God as a way of seeking self-identity. That perceived loss of his fathers esteem became the motor behind his works. After earlier successes, the icy reception of his most ambitious play, Der Mitmacher, in 1976, left the author in such a frustrated state of disappointment that he reached a point of linguistic breakdown. This book contends that Drrenmatts loss of voice forced the author to a new kind of writing: a re-turn home. Becoming Fiction explores the damage caused by Drrenmatts inability to express his most central beliefs through the outdated, deceptive modes of linguistic thought and tradition. Consequently, the book argues, at the point of that breakdown of rigid linguistic and theological concepts, a space was forced open, and the Stoffe reveal a Divine presence.