Gergely Péterfy’s Stuffed Barbarian [‘Kitömött Barbár’], the Ethics of Narration and the Politics of the Human: A British Context

Abstract

This paper presents Gergely Péterfy’s Stuffed Barbarian [Kitömött Barbár, 2014] in the context of eighteenth-century, pre-Revolutionary debates on slavery and the related question of the “human.” It investigates the ethical and political stakes of Péterfy’s narrative technique and argues that the improbably omniscient, third person character narration used throughout the novel performs the universalist and exclusive ideology Bildung of the European Enlightenment, which Péterfy mourns.