Quest to belong:: Home as a metaphor to human cognition in Carla Maliandi’s The German Room (2017)

Abstract

This research hinges on psychological cognition to conceptualize ontological precariousness of the nameless character in Carla Maliandi's The German Room. It attempts to chronicle a tedious journey of Maliandi's female protagonist by postulating uprootedness as a psychological trauma. This paper also aims at understanding exile as a form of loneliness that subverts intricacies of self to render one's belongingness laced with hurdles. It efforts at portraying how the lady passes through stages of numerous struggles due to her inability to cope with different external physical surroundings. Resultantly, she gets converted into a perturbed being with no sense of security while making errands to join broken memories of past. By attempting to comprehend alienated state of living as one that impact one's cognition, this research underscores its essence to posit exile as a disordering entity. By dealing with precariousness of her central figure, Maliandi has orchestrated a new landscape for her character- one that juggles with psychic memories of her days gone by. The research work becomes a notable increment to contemporary psychological cognitive studies with its foray into ramifications of displaced living in connection to mental attributes of such characters. Read alongside Heideggerian and Casey-inflected phenomenologies of place, the novel suggests that home functions not as an incidental attachment but as a precondition of ontological stability so that its loss constitutes a disruption of selfhood rather than a merely circumstantial hardship.