Zur Darstellung des Antihelden in der deutschsprachigen und afrikanischen Erzählliteratur des 20. Jahrhunderts: Eine Untersuchung am Beispiel von Friedrich Dürrenmatts „Die Panne“ und „Der Zwiespalt des Samba Diallo“ von Cheikh Hamidou Kane

Abstract

In the literary landscape or in narrative literature, characters are at the centre of the plots. From ancient literature with the epic to modern times with the narrative form of the novel, characters are most important to the narrative. However, how they have been represented over time shows a development that clearly demonstrates how characters have been represented from the beginnings of literature to postmodern times and what this representation has to do with their epoch and its value systems. With the epic, the characters portrayed were warrior heroes to whom certain virtues were attributed and who corresponded to the zeitgeist of their epoch, i.e. an epoch in which man was in harmony with society. The novel is, according to Georg Lukács (1916), the modern form of the epic, but it marks the alienation of the individual in modernity, where characters increasingly function as counter-images or extensions of classical heroes. In this respect, modern narrative literature gives rise to anti-heroes that are more in line with the new aesthetic demands. However, as Fotis Jannidis (2004) points out, narrative research on character theory does not remain exhaustive, because literary studies has not yet done extensive research to the weighty role of the character. This paper therefore intends to study the construction of the antihero in the 20th century with the help of two literary spaces in order to show exactly how antiheroes emerge in different cultural contexts and what this emergence symbolises and represents for their respective societies. The narrative texts "Die Panne" by Friedrich Dürrenmatt and "Der Zwiespalt des Samba Diallo" by Cheikh Hamidou Kane are used for this investigation. Socio-historical aspects were taken into account to allow the connection of the portrayal of the anti-hero with the social story to emerge, as in "Die Panne". Emphasis was also placed on how, in the context of 20th century African literature, colonisation contributed to the emergence of the anti-heroic and how " Der Zwiespalt des Samba Diallo " attempts to deconstruct colonial discourse.