| Abstract [eng] |
This master’s thesis investigates the coming-of-age narrative in Rebeka Una’s novel Atjunk (Disconnect, 2015), arguing that the novel functions as a contemporary Bildungsroman within the framework of the dystopian genre. Theoretical framework draws on A. J. Greimas’s semiotics, G. Genette’s narratology, M. Foucault’s biopolitical perspective, G. Deleuze’s concept of the society of control, and Christian P. Haines’s biopolitical utopianism. The analysis demonstrates that the society depicted in the novel is organized not through open repression, but through the discourse of safety, hygiene, convenience, progress, and optimization. The System regulates the body, emotions, movement, memory, and social relations, thus corresponding to Foucault’s concept of biopolitics. Deleuze’s theory of control society further reveals that power operates through constant connectivity, data collection, monitoring, and behavioral modulation. However, what the System defines as deviation gradually acquires an opposite value in the narrative: Gryta’s bodily impulses, longing, desire for touch become the basis for resistance and self-formation. Genette’s narratology helps to show that Gryta’s maturation is constructed through narrative form. The novel’s two-part structure marks the movement from the formation of thought to existential choice. First-person narration reveal the dystopian world gradually, as Gryta’s experience begins to diverge from the System’s norms. Analepses restore the values of the lost past, while proleptic moments point to the threat of more radical control. The analysis reveals that Gryta’s narrative programme is initiated by bodily impulses that prove stronger than the System’s normative self-regulation. The System in turn operates through modal deception, presenting obligation as desire and prohibition as recommendation. Coming-of-age in the novel is therefore not an integration into the System but a gradual trajectory of unmasking this deception, reclaiming body senses, and achieving existential agency. Compared to the international YA dystopia tradition (Suzanne Collins‘ The Hunger games, Veronica Roth‘s Divergent, Scott Westerfeld‘s Uglies), the resistance in Atjunk is not modeled as collective political rebellion. Although the System’s control has biopolitical dimensions, the novel is primarily concerned with the colonization of everyday life and the body. This orientation is particularly relevant in the context of twenty-first-century identity, when control no longer necessarily appears as open coercion, but may operate through care, safety, convenience, hygiene, efficiency, and social inclusion. The point of maturity is taking responsibility for one’s own choice – the ability to choose not the easiest path, but the one that preserves one’s humanity. |
