A Solitary Man in the Space of Genocide

In this essay, I discuss a particular narrative structure manifest in contemporary genocide narratives, a structure based on a distinctive presence of a first-person – usually male – narrator, who describes his experiences and reflections born in the course of his peregrinations to sites of mass extermination. Rooting my research in geocriticism, I explore ties between spaceand memory, which allows me to distinguish several levels of analyzed texts, tending towards metaphysical generalizations of nihilistic or patriotic nature. I apply the said analytical categories to my study of selected passages of Dawid Szkoła’s and Przemysław Dakowicz’s respective essays.