SOURCE: Best, Otto F. “Self-Analysis and Confession: Leavetaking and Vanishing Point.” In Peter Weiss, translated by Ursule Molinaro, pp. 14-23. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1976.

In the following essay, Best examines the novels Leavetaking and Vanishing Point as works of confessional literature.

Abschied von den Eltern (tr. Leavetaking) and Fluchtpunkt (tr. Vanishing Point) are important contributions to the genre of confessional literature. Both works are marked by the attempt to reconstruct the past in its entirety, to create an “objective” image of childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood. In the course of the confession events that are in the narrator's past take on shape and form in the present.

In each work a narrator gives an account of the contradictory nature which he discovers within himself and which he considers typical of his world and of his time. The authenticity of subjective frankness characterizes both works. The intensity...