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Holocaust and Genocide Studies 1994 8(3):372-394; doi:10.1093/hgs/8.3.372
© 1994 by United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
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Syndrome and Shoah: Walker Percy's Parable of the Holocaust

Stephen R. Haynes

Rhodes College Memphis, Tennessee

In his novel, The Thanatos Syndrome (1987), American philosopher and novelist Walker Percy develops two related themes—the contrast between abstract theory and historical reality and the unique unsubsumability of the Jewish people. Percy's concern with the latter theme grew directly from his own experiences in Nazi Germany in 1934. Percy's novel, in fact, is a parable of the Holocaust that invites readers to undergo a process of "reorientation by disorientation." By writing his compelling parable of the Holocaust Percy suggests that faithful use of the Shoah in fiction is limited by factors other than one's ethnic identity or religious tradition.


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