Silence and World War II in Ricardo Menéndez Salmón’s Narrative

Abstract

Ricardo Mendendez Salmón’s La ofensa (2007) and Medusa (2012) are two of the latest Spanish novels that are set in World War II. The Asturian writer establishes this military conflict as the frame where some of his most idiosyncratic themes as a writer can be displayed, namely the reflection on evil and the role that art plays facing it. This paper aims to analyze these novels’ common plan: silence as a response to horror, which is an attitude represented both by Kurt and Prohaska, the main characters on each story. Thus, two core ideas will be developed: the silence of the individual (Kurt and Prohaska) and the silence of the art (Prohaska and the own narrator of both novels). This generates a metanarrative dimension in which the narrator makes use of the same detachment strategies that the main character carries out in order to depict war. Ultimately, all these features respond to the construction of an appropriate setting that allows the development of the thematic invariants that define Menéndez Salmón’s literature.