The fat child

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The short story The Fat Child by Marie Luise Kaschnitz , first published in 1952, is about a woman who, to her horror, finds herself in the body of a fat child.

Table of contents

The first-person narratorreports that "the fat child" comes naturally through the front door one day and stands in front of the narrator. The twelve-year-old girl who wears old-fashioned clothes stands in the room without saying anything, but then introduces herself as “the fat one” and answers questions with “yes”, “no” and “I don't know”. As time goes on, the narrator realizes that she detests this child. She wants to throw it out, stop giving him anything, but she can't because she's somehow attracted to it. When the child eats, she compares it to a caterpillar that eats slowly, as if by compulsion. It looks ridiculous, but it can stay, even though she is upset, speaks coldly to the child. After a while it says goodbye, but as soon as it is outside, the narrator has the urge to run after it. She goes after the child unnoticed. The child is clumsy on the ice, resembling a toad. The narrator watches from a distance. She hears someone calling. A light figure calls for "the fat one". It's her sister. Then the fat woman breaks into the ice near the bank, does not seem to be able to get out, but ultimately shows will and courage and pulls out.

Interpretative approach

Since the story is written as a first-person narration, the reader can learn a lot about the thoughts of the narrator, or the feelings she has towards the fat child. However, since the child represents herself, she makes her judgment indirectly about herself. With this she looks at herself, in a kind of mirror, with a certain distance, whereby she evaluates herself. The short story also shows parallels to Marie Luise Kaschnitz's childhood. She, too, felt worse than her sisters. In the short story she tells part of her childhood. She describes herself as the fat little child who resembles a caterpillar and she feels disgust and hatred for herself. As a child she had no opinion of her own and was in the shadow of her sisters. (Kaschnitz: "I hurt myself easily, and it hurts me easily, the siblings, the mother, the father who overlooks me.") The fact that she has not recognized the fat child for such a long time suggests that she forgot her childhood or even repressed it. This suggests that she did not have a happy childhood until she started fighting, because when the child was struggling to survive in the ice, she realized it. The title and the role of the narrator also play an important role here. The title “Das dicke Kind” suggests that this short story is about this child, but since the narrator tells from the first-person perspective and thus reveals a lot about herself, it is not initially clear who of the two is the main character. The narrator initially reports very objectively, but after a while she gives more and more evaluations about the child, which connect the two and bring them closer together. After all, they are so close that at the end of the story they merge into one person.

symbolism

First of all, the animal symbolism is striking: the narrator compares the child with a caterpillar. This associates that the child is in the development phase. The fat child develops like a caterpillar that is developing into a butterfly, which must / can develop its personality in the true sense of the word. The caterpillar continues to eat, it seems as if it is acting out of compulsion and gobbling everything it gets into itself. The toad is clumsy, sliding around on the floor and taking forever to reach its destination. Shortly afterwards, the child breaks into the ice. That's when everything changes. It breaks in and out of its old role. The child now has to fight to get to the shore. The narrator doesn't believe that the child will make it, but you can see the will in the child's face, and with the ice, the child's shell is also broken. The child has to come out alone, there is no one to help or to tell what to do. That awkwardness is gone, and although the fingers are bleeding, it pulls itself up and continues to fight. That is the moment in which the narrator finds herself in the child and that is probably also the moment in which the life of the narrator has changed, because before that she did not recognize the child. It wasn't until it struggled that she knew who it was and became aware of what was before it before she started fighting. Now it is also clear what the child meant when he said that he was born “in Aquarius”, because it is a January day when the child breaks into the ice. The child was born for the second time on this day, so to speak, in the zodiac sign "Aquarius". Another noticeable thing is the weather: It gets cold and uncomfortable. One can associate it with the development that is unpleasant for the narrator, since she unrolls the past and the repressed. The ice stands for the repressed: However, events or situations (in this case the dream, the narrator's vision) bring back the old, unpleasant past, because the ice breaks at some point and then it is up to everyone whether they can save themselves or sink into the past in the true sense.

References

  1. ↑ http://www.dichterinnen.de/Kaschnitz/Biographie.htm

literature