The Paradox of Testimony and First-Person Plural Narration in Jensen's We, the Drowned

In their article "The Paradox of Testimony and First-Person Plural Narration in Jensen's We the Drowned" Divya Dwivedi and Henrik Skov Nielsen posit that the analysis of narratives of limit-experiences provides insight into literature's relation with the formation of community and subjectivity. Testimonies such as Primo Levi's If This Is a Man and other narratives of survivors of concentration camps, especially the Muselmanner, focus on aspects of community. Dwivedi and Nielsen discuss how in Carsten Jensen's novel We, the Drowned group identity, intersubjectivity, and the possibility for and mode of testimony about traumatic events are narrated. Although Jensen's novel departs from mimetic or "natural" techniques of telling in non-fictional discourse, its "unnatural" narrative techniques tell us much about historical and political realities and actual experiences of discontinuity, death, testimony, and war.