Narrating the Holocaust: a focalization reading of Michael Chabon’s The Final Solution

This paper offers a focalization reading of Michael Chabon’s The Final Solution, attempting to uncover the way the author narrates the Holocaust with both animal and human perspectives. Drawing on the existing scholarship regarding focalization, it engages with the parrot’s and the old man’s points of view, and looks at their significance to the representation of the protagonist’s Holocaust memories. Aided by Holocaust imagery and consciousness representation techniques, the parrot’s animal and the old man’s Holmesian perspectives evoke the scenes of the Holocaust and the Nazi images, and show a Holocaust that is irrational, unknowable and unspeakable, that is, Chabon reconfigures the focalization structure of Holmesian canon to demonstrate the inability of Holmesian reason to solve the mystery of the Holocaust, and the inability of human language to speak about the horror and trauma of the Holocaust. For Chabon, this unique focalization pattern helps to present the trauma and existential crisis of the protagonist, and narrate his Holocaust memories artistically.