A Simultaneous Gesture of Proximity and Distance: W.G. Sebald's Empathic Narrative Persona

W.G. Sebald’s prose narratives exist at the borderline of the novel form. Their self-conscious hybridity, combining memoir, historical account, travelogue, and fiction, may be seen as pushing the boundaries of genre. But Sebald’s use of a narrator-figure with some biographical correspondence to the author, who takes part in the action, enables an even greater crossing of borders: those between past and present, memory and history, and current and previous generations. This insertion of what I call an “empathic narrative persona” between author and subject helps enable an approach to the past in which proximity and distance occur simultaneously in a complex gesture of empathy. By situating these narratives in the context of the Sebaldian persona, I show how the author self-reflexively foregrounds the process of LaCaprian “empathic unsettlement” by establishing close personal connection with the victims of history while simultaneously inserting several layers of structural and epistemological distance.