AMONG THE LAYERS OF THE ONION: AN ANALYSIS OF THE AUTOFICTIONAL REPRESENTATION OF GUNTER GRASS' MEMORIES

Abstract

In Pelling the onion (2007), Gunter Grass presents the memories of his youth and begin of his career as a writer, experiences that were defined by the rise of the nazi regime and the consequences of the Second World War. In this work of literature, the late confession of his voluntary recruitment to the Waffen-SS military group is revealed, information that was hidden by the author for decades, which lead to an ethical debate around Grass' image. We can note that the author associates the report on his personal experience to an ambiguous form of contemporary writing, autofiction, to represent the work with memory. This paper aims into analyzing how the representation of memory is constructed in the autofictional text, regarding the articulation of the historical, subjective, and literary questions in the work.