Inevitability of the Pain Experience in Margaret Mazzantini’s Novels

Abstract

In the paper we focus on the motif of pain in a literary text with the aim to analyze the importance of suffering in the lives of characters and to find out whether the pain determines the behaviour and the reactions of characters. We start from the assumption that the experience of pain influences the characters in the way that it incites them to re-examine their decisions and that it encourages them to transgress the boundaries in certain situations. In the analysis we study two novels by the contemporary Italian authoress Margaret Mazzantini, in which the individual suffering is intertwined with the suffering of the society; namely, the pain of the motherhood, whether unrealized one or the one in which a mother is not able to protect her own child, is entwined with the suffering of the victims of war or those forced to exile. The pain is, therefore, analyzed on two levels: that of the characters and that of the setting. The suffering of the individual transforms into the prism which helps us to understand the collective suffering, as well as the responsibility of the individual and the collective responsibility. In this way we find out the moral value of the pain since what results in the transition from the individual to collective suffering is the bond that unites the people in the common experience of pain.

DOI: 10.5901/ajis.2013.v2n8p511