Memory

Austerlitz’s ongoing work to convey his personal account to the narrator is a manifestation of his desire to remember his past. Because Austerlitz is sent from Prague to London in 1939 when he is just just four and a half, he has almost no memory of his life before moving to Bala with his foster parents Emyr and Gwendolyn. However, throughout his childhood in Bala, Austerlitz lives with the sense that “something very obvious, very manifest in itself [is] hidden from him” (54). The haunted and lonely feeling he experiences throughout his childhood is in fact the result of his buried past in Prague before the war. Therefore, when Austerlitz begins to encounter reminders of this era in his adulthood, he experiences flashbacks that in turn cause him to remember fragments of his life before arriving in Wales. His emotional response to the Liverpool Street Station particularly...