The story of Mr. Sommer

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The story of Mr. Sommer is a novella by the German writer Patrick Süskind , published in 1991 by Diogenes Verlag , with pictures by Jean-Jacques Sempé .

content

The narrator describes in retrospect the childhood of a boy in a southern German town . His rather unhappy life is marked by piano lessons with an unfairly strict teacher, his long way to school (his hometown is divided by a lake and the school is on the other side), the superficiality of his parents and a desperate, but futile love for a classmate .

Everyone in town knows the strange Mr. Sommer, who stands out because he is constantly wandering aimlessly and doggedly. Nobody knows where or why. The boy watches Mr.Summer and feels a connection between Mr.Summer's wandering and his own emotional wandering.

The book ends with Mr. Sommer's suicide by drowning, which the boy accidentally observes. The days after that, Mr. Sommer is missing, but nobody worries. After two weeks, however, a missing person report is posted. But you can't find Mr. Sommer. The boy says nothing about the incident at the lake, and so the people in town soon forgot all about it.

interpretation

The novella can be seen as an example of unreliable narration . The narrator begins the story with a mathematically accurate calculation of the speed of his fall and ends his story by describing the death of Mr. Sommer. The fictional part of it seems that Mr.Summer drowned in the lake because he wandered into it and did not fight back. The narrator keeps addressing his own unreliability, since he has had problems concentrating since he fell from a tree. He also suffers from a right-left weakness.

Problems with calculating simple math problems, right-left weakness and the admitted difficulty concentrating could be traced back to the fact that the narrator suffered damage to the brain ( angular gyrus ) when he fell from a tree and has since suffered from Gerstmann's syndrome . If one follows this interpretation, the entire narrated reality, including the existence of Mr. Sommer, is called into doubt. See the article by Bareis (see below).

Book editions

literature

  • Andreas Blödorn: Perception of time (possibility) in space: The story of Mr.Summer - a postmodern game with interpretation patterns . In: Andreas Blödorn, Christine Hummel (Hrsg.): Psychograms of Postmodernism. New investigations into the work of Patrick Süskind . WVT, Trier 2008, ISBN 978-3-86821-005-7 .
  • J. Alexander Bareis: What is true in fiction? On the principle of the genre convention and the unreliability of the narrator in Patrick Süskind's “The Story of Mr. Summer” . In: Scientia Poetica 13 (2009), pp. 230–245.

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