Receptive Strategy of Martin Amis's Novel “The Zone of Interest”

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.

receptive strategy, narrative pragmatics, narrator-character, Holocaust novels, Martin Amis, The Zone of Interest