In Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald, Time is an oppressive, omnipresent narrator that helps tell the story of Austerlitz, a survivor of Kindertransport, who suffered from an oppressed childhood with his foster parents in England during the separation from his own Jewish family. To Sebald, through the narrative of the main character, Austerlitz, Time creates a string attached the past, the present and the future; Time, in the book, is also represented as deep fear and guilt of a Holocaust survivor. Through Time, the readers can have a glance onto life as an exile and his repressed childhood of Austerlitz.
To Sebald, Time is made of three layers of the the past, the present and the future, and such three layers are inseparable. Time notion is portrayed by Sebald’s fictive character, Austerlitz, who relates Time to a place representing this notion the best-train station and its railway. In the book, nowhere can
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It was not until in his fifties that Austerlitz could gain his memories back, he had been living in a repressed childhood spent with his foster parents for years leading to the moment of revelation. As consequence, Austerlitz longs for going back “behind the time” and connecting the three stages to so that he is able to recover his lost memory as an innocent Jews kid living with his beloveds.
Besides making his own notion of Time, Sebald, though his character Austerlitz, develops this strange fear toward this ever-changing continuous movement when confronting the ‘Time’ as exemplified by the train stations.
Austerlitz character created by Sebald seems to be trapped in his own thoughts that Time is something horrendous, something that takes controls of everything, of how the world functioning, taking away freedom from the world that we human are living