Dying by Instalments, the Cannibalism of a Regime

Abstract

The paper analyses certain aspects of the narration of trauma in one of the best-known Slovenian novels thematising the violence of the Yugoslav regime in the 1940s and 1950s, Umiranje na obroke [Dying by Instalments, 1984], by the playwright and prose writer Igor Torkar (1913-2004). The paper contextualises the novel in the historical situation in Slovenia during the Second World War and in the period immediately after it, and relates it to other earlier and later representations of these themes in Slovenian literature.