Male Characters in Vanda Rozenbergová’s Fiction

Abstract

The paper analyses the depiction of male characters in the selected texts of the Slovak author Vanda Rozenbergová. Most of the attention is focused on a specific set of problems – on young/adolescent male characters within certain family and partner configurations and on the segments of childhood/adolescence displayed in Rozenbergová’s three books: Slobodu bažantom (Freedom to Pheasants) (2015), Muž z jamy a deti z lásky (The Man out of a Hole and the Children out of Love) (2017), and Zjedol som Lautreca (I Ate Lautrec) (2021), not only because they offer a very good insight into her general style of writing, but also due to her assessment of the character/hero of our times and forms of masculinity in contemporary literature. The interpreted prose largely deals with adolescence as an important period during which the a child turns into an adult. Rozenbergerová’s non-adult protagonists often represent the cathartic aspect of an insensitive society which lacks the sense of fellowship as well as empathy. Their meaning of life and its value is represented by almost epistemological privilege in the child’s ability to see what cannot be seen by the adult.