SOURCE: “Postmodernizing the Holocaust: William Gass in The Tunnel,” in New England Review, Vol. 18, No. 3, Summer, 1997, pp. 79-87.

In the following essay, Klein examines Gass's postmodern conflation of personal and national history, morality, and guilt associated with the horrors of Nazi Germany as presented through the protagonist, Kohler, in The Tunnel. “Given the perspective to which we are invited,” Klein concludes, “Kohler's evil amounts to an irrelevant tawdriness.”

The subject is the Shoah, the Catastrophe, and how to account for it—a subject in history, to say the least, to which Gass as novelist and as theorist of fiction brings a presumption of the uncertainty of narrative and of the autonomy of language. This of course is nothing like Holocaust-denial. To the contrary, it is engagement of any sort that is thrown into doubt, in the postmodern way. “Postmodernism” no doubt is showing its age and has become...