This dissertation examines the historical significance of Christoph Ransmayr’s novels The Horrors of Ice and Darkness, The Last World and Morbus Kitahara within a narratological and reader-centered theoretical framework. The representation of historical courses of events in Ransmayr’s works is analyzed with respect to its effects on the novels’ implied reader.
I use a dual approach to illustrate the connections between historical and fictional events, as they are conveyed to the reader. I relate text-internal strategies of constructing a fictional world to text-external allusions. Furthermmore, I identify the precise crossing and departure points of fictional and historical facts and their possibilities. The close relationship and correspondence between text-internal discontinuities - breaks in the time-space construction of the fictional worlds - and text-external transgressions of logical, historical and literary frameworks are consistent with a portrayal of history as a course of multiple possibilities, governed by chance rather than causality.
This interpretation of Ransmayr’s works challenges the argument that the fictional representation of historical events blurs or distorts their political relevance. Precisely the fictitious or plausible elements point to the central historical experience of discontinuity and emptiness, an experience which is most evident in the depiction of war in Morbus Kitahara with its unpredictable, destructive consequences.