The Story Archive

Inferno

August Strindberg · 1897 CE · Novel · Nordic · Victorian

A Swedish writer alone in Paris gives up literature for alchemy, burns his hands trying to make gold in a hotel room, and reads the noise through the wall, the shape of a stain, a scrap of newspaper and every stranger in the street as messages from powers ranged against him. Written in French out of the diaries of his worst years, it takes the persecution as literal and the sufferer as a soul under correction rather than a patient. The crisis it records closed his naturalist period and opened everything he wrote afterwards.

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Lineage

Attributes

Genre
PsychologicalGothic
Theme
MadnessFaith & DoubtIsolation & AlienationGuilt & ConscienceSuffering & Endurance
Archetype (Jung / Campbell)
WandererMagician
Plot structure
ConfessionEpisodic
Symbol / motif
FireThe CityThe Cross / Altar
Conflict
vs Selfvs Supernatural
Mode / tone
GothicModernist
Culture / tradition
Nordic

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