FUNKCIJA SELEKCIJE, KARAKTERIZACIJE I KONSTELACIJE LIKOVA U ROMANU VOLFGANGA HERNDORFA „ČIK“
The subject of the present work is Wolfgang Herrndorf’s award-winning youth novel Tsch- ick (i.e. “German Youth Literature Prize” (2011) and “Clemens Brentano Prize” (2012)). The novel, released in 2010, has sold more than two million copies to date and has been translated into more than 25 languages. In the novel, the story is told by Maik Klingenberg, a fourteen- year-old teenager who is left devastated by the surrounding circumstances and his outsider position before the summer holidays, but through his friendship with Tschick (during the summer holidays) experiences a solution and development process that changes his view of the world and his positioning to his environment and to himself in a positive way. The main focus of the work lies on the (explicit and implicit) character selection, characterization and constellation in the text. The methodological approach to textual analysis is based on insights from narratology, sociology and psychoanalysis. After a theoretical-introductory part, the text-analytical part begins with the selection of the staff of the fictitious world depicted in the novel and shows that the author’s novel gives a pluralistic-heterogeneous-inter- or transcul- tural social image of the German capital Berlin and its (wider) environment. In the following chapter of the work, the introductory characterization of the main character and the related figure constellations will be discussed in more detail. It is shown that Herrndorf uses these constellations to address the complex interrelation between the individual and various col- lective identities, such as those into which the subject is born (Maik’s parents), and those to whom the subject belongs based on the present circumstances of life (Maik’s teacher and the other students of the school). The focus of analysis of the following part lies on those figure constellations that have arisen as a result of Maik’s escape from the structures crushing him (Maik’s voluntary social interactions and friendly ties) and by which the author refers to the dynamic constitution of personal identity, of which the developmental process defies static defining and reveals the possibility of self-change and self-development. Based on the pre- viously given text analysis, the last part of the thesis gives a conclusion corresponding to the analysis results.