A burning knife: Suicide, sublimation and slapstick in Arne Østring's "Out of the Silence"

Abstract

Arne Østring’s flash fiction «Out of the Silence» could certainly be read as a slightly comical text about a Japanese kamikaze pilot’s – a suicide bomber’s – impossible raid against a militarily superior enemy, but more interestingly the text balances a war-logic and a rational psychology, it unpacks the premise and backstory of kamikaze war, and it situates a suicide bomber as what sociologist Norbert Elias called homo clausus: the isolated, enclosed individual who is all alone in the world. And finally, the text demonstrates that a reading of literary suicides must always be a reading of the text.