Receptive Strategy of Martin Amis's Novel “The Zone of Interest”
https://doi.org/10.24224/2227-1295-2025-14-8-278-295
Abstract
This article examines the receptive potential of Martin Amis’s novel “The Zone of Interest” and identifies the narrative strategies it employs to engage the reader. The study’s relevance stems from a discernible shift in contemporary fiction toward focusing on the figure of the war criminal, coupled with ongoing scholarly interest in communicative strategies that activate the reader’s consciousness. The primary aim of this research is to delineate the work’s receptive strategy and to uncover the mechanisms through which the reader is drawn into the co-construction of the text’s meaning. The analysis focuses on “The Zone of Interest”, a novel related from the perspectives of three participants in the concentration camp system: the commandant, an ordinary officer, and a member of the Sonderkommando. Employing the methodologies of narrative pragmatics and narrative analysis, the study presents the findings of a comprehensive examination of the text’s compositional, subject, and object organization. It is demonstrated that the novel’s cyclical structure, polyphonic narrative, and depiction of the narrators’ moral and linguistic deformation collectively form a strategy that provokes the reader to construct their own interpretation of the events. The author concludes that the novel’s receptive strategy serves as a vehicle for a complex ethical and aesthetic impact. It is emphasized that the emotional detachment encoded in the narrators’ accounts fosters a profound re-evaluation of the concepts of guilt, victimhood, and responsibility.
About the Author
E. S. Zhironkina
Ural Federal University named after the First President of Russia B. N. Yeltsin
Russian Federation
Russian Federation
Evgeniya S. Zhironkina, PhD in Philology, junior research scientist, Scientific Research Institute of Russian Culture
Yekaterinburg
References
1. Aarons, V., Berger, A. L. (2017). Third-Generation Holocaust Representation: Trauma, History, and Memory. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. 263 p. ISBN 9780810134096.
2. Badrideen, A. (2017). The Banality of Good And Evil in The Zone of Interest. English: Journal of the English Association, 66 (255): 311—327. DOI: 10.1093/english/efx042/.
3. Bogdanova, O. V., Kovtun, N. V. (2014). Communication strategies in the “middle literature” of the turn of the XX—XXI centuries: the case of L. Ulitskaya. Bulletin of Saint Petersburg-St. Petersburg University. Language and literature, 1: 14— 25. (In Russ.).
4. Camus, S. (2024). “But will I write disgustingly?” The Shock of Transmission in Martin Amis’s The Zone of Interest. Études britanniques contemporaines. Revue de la Société dʼétudes anglaises contemporaines, 66: 123—139. DOI: 10.4000/11r4o.
5. Duffy, H. (2024). The crisis of humanism, the Holocaust and “The Jewish Dog” as a de/re-humanising figure in French literature. In: The Routledge Companion to Literatures and Crisis. New York; London: Routledge. 244—255.
6. Hirsch, M. (2021). Generation of post-memory. Writing and visual culture after the Holocaust. Moscow: New Publishing House. 428 p. ISBN 978-5 98379-251-7. (In Russ.).
7. Korchinsky, A. V. (2019). On the pragmatics of narrative. Poetics and pragmatics of narrative practices. Yekaterinburg: INTMEDIA. 7—13. ISBN 978-5-6040560-4-2. (In Russ.).
8. Locher, M. A., Jucker, A. H. (2021). The Pragmatics of Fiction: Literature, Stage and Screen Discourse. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 290 p. ISBN 978-1474447942.
9. Mardanov, A. A. (2014). The destructive potential of increasing entropy in the work of Martin Amis. Bulletin of the Polotsk State University. Series A. Humanities, 10: 22—26. (In Russ.).
10. Mardanov, A. A. (2016). The image of the inconsistency of rational ideological constructions in the novels of M. Amis “Arrow of Time” and “Zone of interests”. Bulletin of the Polotsk State University. Series A, 10: 78—83. (In Russ.).
11. Mey, J. (2011). Pragmatic and Literature. In: Foundations of Pragmatics. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 511—536.
12. Seraf, L. (2015). Narrative perspective in two contemporary perpetrator novels: Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones (2010) and Martin Amis' The Zone of Interest. Spain: Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona. 75 p.
13. Shunikov, V. L. (2007). Communicative strategies of the “I” narrative (based on the works of modern Russian literature). New Philological Bulletin, 1: 34—42. (In Russ.).
14. Siertsema, V. (2022). The Tension between Fact and Fiction in Holocaust Literature. Interdisciplinary Journal for Religion and Transformation in Contemporary Society, 8: 83—99.
15. Thorsten, W. (2020). Holocaust Narratives Trauma, Memory and Identity Across Generations. New York; London: Routledge. 218 p. ISBN 9780367540883.
16. Tyupa, V. I. (2015). The ethos of narrative intrigue. Bulletin of the Russian State University of Economics. Series: Literary Studies. Linguistics. Cultural studies, 2: 9—19. (In Russ.).
17. Zhironkina, E. S. (2024). Receptive strategy as an element of poetics (based on the novel by J. Littell’s “The Kindly Ones”). PhD Diss. Kazan. 181 p. (In Russ.).
Review
For citations:
Zhironkina E.S. Receptive Strategy of Martin Amis's Novel “The Zone of Interest”. Nauchnyi dialog. 2025;14(8):278-295. (In Russ.) https://doi.org/10.24224/2227-1295-2025-14-8-278-295
Views:
60
Email this article 