Good And Evil: Postmodernist Reevaluation Of The Holocaust In The White Hotel

D. M. Thomas's The White Hotel juxtaposes multiple narrative discourses in different forms, integrating psychoanalytical discourse with historical discourse and combining the author's imaginative discourse, so as to present a postmodern reevaluation of the most atrocious massacre in the twentieth century:the Babi Yar Holocaust.The Holocaust raises profound questions concerning the criterions of good and evil. A psychoanalytic reading of the questions of good and evil might be the most popular one, but it fails in accounting for the entire human disorder and instability. In The White Hotel, Thomas attempts to interpret the cause of the Holocaust by combining two main privileged twentieth-century discourses, the historical and the psychoanalytical discourses, with his own authorial discourse. In doing so, he represents a radical critique of the excessive reliance on instrumental reason as well as the deficiency of modernity. Therefore, D. M. Thomas's text can be regarded as a postmodern reading of the history, since it offers novel perspectives on a range of issues in people's understanding of the Holocaust and its aftermath.The present author intends to further explore the theme of The White Hotel. The Holocaust seemed to be a systematic annihilation, and the civilizing process eventually brought about the Holocaust. However, as a postmodernist writer, Thomas implicitly expresses a wish to find a remedy which is beneath the human psyche, would cure and possibly redeem people and the world that have suffered horrific destructions like the Holocaust in the human history.