Marinheiro ou camponês? Algumas reflexões sobre as leituras de Sebald do ensaio “O narrador” de Walter Benjamin ("Seaman" or " Peasant"? Some reflections on Sebald's reading of Walter Benjamin's essay "The Narrator")

W.G. Sebald’s private library, which is held in part in the Deutsches

Literaturarchiv, contains a copy of Walter Benjamin’s Illuminationen. This essay seeks to

establish a theoretical framework for Sebald’s narrative technique by investigating his

annotations in the closing essay of the book, “The Narrator”. With the help of his underlinings

and marginalia, Sebald’s own narrative structures can be interpreted as a means of depicting

“natural history”, as an aesthetic response to a philosophical concept. Two principles can be

derived from this perspective: the strategy of “interlocking layers” (Einschachteln), and the

strategy of montage. It is the dialectic between these two principles that drives Sebald’s prose

style. The tension in his work between fact and fiction derives ultimately from an uneasy

relationship between his artfully constructed prose-style on the one hand and its quasidocumentary

realism on the other.