The Way To Return—On The Use Of Photos In Austerlitz

W.G.Sebald(1944-2001)was a contemporary German writer.In his last long work Austerlitz,he mainly presented the hero Austerlitz's journey to return to the past and explore his repressed personal history.The core theme of this book is the writer's worries about how to contact and represent the past.And the black-and-white images which interspersed in the text are the most important formal features.This dissertation focuses on these interspersed photos and explores how the author finally constructed the theme of returning to the past from the literary experiments on memory and time.Starting from the background of Sebald's era,this dissertation explores his motive for creation.Organizing my own thinking path on the topic of how Sebald used photos.On the one hand,Sebald led readers to question the close connection between photos and reality through the subtle misalignment between photos and texts,denying that photos have the function of confirming the past reality.On the other hand,Sebald revealed the source of the problematic memory.The memory in photos and objects cannot help shape Austerlitz's present memory which actually needs imagination and narration.In the case that the photos cannot confirm the past reality and reconstruct the present memory,Sebald finally turned towards time.Linear time was rejected,past time returned in the form of space,and photos provide a way to know the past by realizing the simultaneous existence of the past and the present.