The muted I: Locating a narrator in the works of W.G. Sebald

This dissertation probes the identity and pursuits of the first-person narrator in the fictional works of W.G. Sebald (1944-2001). I posit that the common narrator of Sebald's fiction is driven by ontological and historical needs that align with aspects of his exilic interlocutors while seeking to distance himself from the Nazi legacy that is obliquely but unmistakably ascribed to a father figure. While studies of Sebald's works have largely addressed overarching themes such as exile and natural and historical catastrophe, I address rather how the texts' detailed descriptions and abundant use of names and visual imagery reveal the first-person narrator's ongoing quest as a basis for those larger themes and concerns. By querying how his encounters with exilic and often German-Jewish protagonists serve the narrator's purposes, my study aims to expose a more covert narrative strategy in Sebald's fiction, one that utilizes nominal and visual references to negotiate a post-Shoah German identity. Chapter One addresses how the mother's name and its symbolic configurations function as a source for the narrator's identity. I examine this maternal constellation, and its connection to the narrator's alpine origins, in Chapter Two, where I show how it is inscribed onto the peripatetic narrator's numerous destinations, as well as into the images and paintings that he encounters. Chapter Three examines the narrator's technique of establishing an identity through his interlocutors. Focusing primarily on Austerlitz, I address how Sebald's most expansive and final work offers a more complex dimension to the narrator's quest. In seeking affinities with his exilic interlocutors while distancing himself from the father's and his generation's Nazi legacy, Sebald's narrator, I conclude, evinces commemorative strategies that inflect that legacy largely through its familial dimensions.