The backbone of the book, Austerlitz, by James Joyce, is the main character’s encounter with history and exploration as to how history specifically shaped his entire life. Austerlitz, the main character, has a story of a deeply traumatized identity that is trapped between repressed personal memories and the immanent collective memory. Austerlitz eventually tries to “wake” up to the reality of his own past as past memories present themselves to him through the architectural discussions and the constant presence of clocks. Austerlitz seems to have a deep fascination with history and the structure of historical architectural buildings. He finds great interest in looking at different details of each building and observing the unique aspects such…show more content… Austerlitz finds great interest in the history of places and buildings around him because he finds satisfaction in knowing how things came to be and why the buildings that stood before him existed. Austerlitz never “knew who [he] really was” due to his lack of knowledge and the gaps in his memory and always sought to reproduce his own image of self-reality (46). He had always been “prevent[ed] from drawing conclusions” about his identity since his adopted parents kept it hidden for a long while (46). Due to this limitation, he is now trying to find the missing bricks in his wall of memory and self-identity. Like many of the crumbling walls and structures that Austerlitz observes throughout the city, his own defensive walls are gone, and he needs to seek out his past in order to fill in the gaps and maintain some sort of shelter. Through Austerlitz’s self-discovery, one can conclude that the past is seemingly illusive, unless sought after, and that archeology brings to the surface the historical truth. As Austerlitz realizes that the past…show more content… In the beginning of the story, Austerlitz states that “time will not pass away, has not passed away, that [he] can turn back and go behind it, and there I shall find everything as it once was” (101). Austerlitz at first believed that he could go back into his past and find everything unchanged, which, in reality, is unrealistic. Austerlitz’s lack of understanding of time helps to give him hope that the past will remain unchanged after all of the time has passed, and it also keeps him from doubting if the long period of time he had been gone changed his chances of educating himself on his own past. In order to find out the answers to his long gone past and discover the answers that he had been seeking for so long, he realized that he would have to make the effort and seek it out himself instead of expecting a history that he is not even aware of, to present itself at his doorstep. Austerlitz always had a weird fascination with time, which directly correlates to the significant amount of clocks, such as the mighty clock “under the lion crest of the kingdom of Belgium” and at the “Centraal Station” at the beginning of the novel (3,8). Austerlitz had always thought that clocks were “as something ridiculous, [and] a mendacious object” since he had always “resisted the power of time out of some internal compulsion” (101). He seems to find the clocks to be unnecessary. It was probably because he
