MY YEAR OF REST AND RELAXATION IN A WORLD WITH NO REST NOR RELAXATION. NARRATIVE PROSTHESIS AND HYPERREALITY IN OTTESSA MOSHFEGH’S NOVEL.

Abstract

The representation of a form of disability in literature can be used not only as a way of distinguishing the character and setting the narration in motion but as a metaphor of social and individual collapse. Following this idea, I will focus on Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, a 2018 novel that narrates the experiences of a privileged woman in a context of growing aestheticism and its consequent loss of political meaning in the American society of the 90s. In it, I argue, the depression that she suffers from can be observed to work as the engine of the narration and the result of the emptiness derived from the current society of spectacle. I use David T. Mitchell’s and Sharon L. Snyder’s Narrative Prosthesis to delve into the role that the depression the main character suffers from plays in the novel and how she follows the pattern traditionally found in disability narratives. I also use Jean Baudrillard’s analysis of the current state of simulacra to explain her disabled experience.