The Reflexion on the personal (photo) story in Steffen Kverneland’s autofictional graphic novel “A Voluntary Death”

The article explores the genre and thematic features of the graphic novel “A Voluntary Death” (En frivillig død, 2018) written by contemporary Norwegian writer and illustrator Steffen Kverneland (this is the first appeal in Russian literary criticism to this work). The author of the article considers such categories of poetics as composition, chronotope, character system, and pays special attention to the image of the S. Kverneland’s autofictional hero and the image of his father. The poetics of photography, presented in this graphic novel explicitly in the form of the writer’s personal photographs, is also analysed. The author of the book tells the story of his family where the relationship with his father and then his suicide influenced the formation of the auto-hero S. Kverneland as a writer and artist in the form of a combination of graphic and textual components, which is the characteristic of graphic narratives. As a result, it is established that along with the graphic image and text, which are indispensable components of the graphic novel, photography becomes a fundamental structural element. The addition of the author’s personal photographs to the text makes the story of his novel a documentary. Moreover, photography provides an opportunity for multiple interpretations of the central images and the plot-motivational complex of the graphic novel. The genre specificity of this work, directly related to the autofictional beginning, is also inseparable from the poetics of photography and the category of memory. A book idea which is based on the difficult event arises in the mind of the protagonist, but the representation of personal traumatic experience, including through the publication of family photographs (addressing the theme of childhood), allows the central character to overcome trauma through the creation of a work of fiction.