| Summary: | ”Shots, I think I hear shots”: The Use of Repetition in Monika Fagerholm’s The American Girl
This article examines the role and use of repetition in Monika Fagerholm’s novel Den amerikanska flickan (The American Girl, 2005) through a narrative, stylistic and a psychoanalytic reading. Using the work of Bruce F. Kawin, I illustrate how Fagerholm uses a permissive style, which relies on an emphasis generated by repetition. The article also examines how the novel utilizes repetition to manage time, and examines how Sigmund Freud’s notion of ”repetition compulsion” applies to the novel’s characters. The article concludes that Den amerikanska flickan repeatedly uses popular culture, quotations and music until the work itself becomes something beyond its many allusions.
Throughout, I illustrate how repetition permeates the novel in terms of both its theme and characters. Fagerholm is a postmodern author who knows how to challenge the concept of truth, and her novel questions whether a story can be told at all. It could be argued that Fagerholm’s style of writing constitutes an aesthetics of doubt, or search for the truth: a search for an
origin tale, which is biased and therefore impossible to capture.
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