OF SHAME AND SALVATION: THE INTERPLAY OF GRIEF AND GUILT IN THE DISCOMFORT OF EVENING

Abstract [English]

Childhood bereavement produces complex, multifaceted responses, shaped not only by the child but by the larger family and culture. Marieke Lucas Rijneveld’s The Discomfort of Evening (2018; English trans. 2020) chronicles the aftermath of a child’s death in a Dutch Calvinist farming family, narrated through the disoriented voice of ten-year-old Jas. This paper argues that grief in the novel is inseparable from guilt: Jas interprets her brother Matthies’s drowning as punishment for her prayer, internalizing his loss as her fault. Religious intertexts from the Bible provide a punitive framework, while cultural references to Nazi atrocities embed personal mourning within European collective trauma. Through close readings, I demonstrate how Jas’s rituals of shame and self-punishment exemplify Freud’s melancholia and Cathy Caruth’s theory of trauma as belated narration. By drawing on intertextual discourses — scripture, sermons, folklore, and historical memory — Rijneveld dramatizes bereavement not as healing but as melancholic preservation. Shame becomes Jas’s paradoxical salvation, a way of holding onto her brother through guilt and suffering.