His alienated character enables him to see through anti-Semitic ideology. Köves accepts everything that happens to him and always seeks to understand the motives for even the most irrational and horrific events. Although he does not reject religion explicitly, he is sceptical toward it as he speaks about everything around him with academic distance and reservation. The reader meets Köves, a Hungarian Jew, at the moment when his father is obliged to go to a forced labor camp. Having experienced several dictatorships, Kertész uses his oeuvre to find responses for the position of the individual within totalitarian systems and generally in the face of history.įatelessness consists of three main parts: the introduction to the world of György Köves, the 14-yearold protagonist, in the first chapters his arrest and deportation to Auschwitz and his imprisonment in Buchenwald, comprising the major part of the book and his return to postwar Hungary in the last chapter. Without questioning the singularity of the Holocaust, Kertész considers the postwar communist dictatorship in Hungary to be a “continuation” of the Nazi horrors. The experience of the concentration camps has remained a central topic for Kertész in his subsequent works. A novel about a Hungarian-Jewish adolescent boy who is deported to Auschwitz and then imprisoned in Buchenwald, Fatelessness is written in a peculiar ironic-sarcastic tone that differentiates it from common Holocaust representations. Fatelessness is the first novel of Imre Kertész (1929–2016), a work that played a significant part in the author’s receipt of the 2002 Nobel Prize in literature.
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