Austerlitz Literary Elements

Fictional novel

The action takes place in Britain after the end of the Second World War.

The action is told from the perspective of a third-person objective point of view.

The tone and mood is a tense one.

The protagonist is Jacques Austerlitz and the antagonists are the Nazi soldiers who killed his family.

The major conflict is an internal one and is between Jacques Austerlitz's desire to find more about his past and the desire to move on with his life and accept that he will never find the truth.

The story reaches its climax when Jacques Austerlitz's memories start coming back.

The fact that the main character's parents were killed during the war is foreshadowed at the beginning of the novel when Jacques Austerlitz talks about his German heritage.

It is implied during one point in the novel that Jacques Austerlitz's mother was involved with the Nazi propaganda. This is later proven to be an understatement when the narrator finds that his mother was fighting against the Nazi regime.

The main allusion we find here is the idea that Jacques Austerlitz lost his mind because he never found out what truly happened to his parents.

An important image is that of the picture depicting Jacques Austerlitz's mother. The reason why this picture is so important is that it gives Jacques Austerlitz the assurance that his mother was not involved with the Nazi regime.

N/A

A parallel is drawn between the narrator and Jacques Austerlitz and this has the purpose of showing just how much was Jacques Austerlitz affected philologically by the events he experienced during the war.

The cobwebs are used in the novel as a general term through which the narrator makes reference to the idea of secrets and deception.

We have a personification in the line "the streets were screaming and suffocating those who just wanted to take a stroll".