Max Frisch Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Robert M. Adams

Critical Essay by Robert M. Adams

Max Frisch, who has revived (and revised) the story of Blue-beard in a short, quasi-parabolic book [Bluebeard] is a versatile Swiss man of letters with a practiced talent for deliberately fragmented and enigmatic writings. I'm Not Stiller, his first, best-known, and still best book, studied a divided personality, one element of which was intent on repudiating the other; its theme of guilt disintegrating a nonpersonality only vaguely aware of what was being done to it would provide a constant pattern for Frisch's work. Homo Faber was a fable of technological man brought to destruction by the ancient Fates—as well as by an inopportune itch for slender easy young things. Man in the Holocene, though ostensibly about a single senile citizen overwhelmed by his past and fading out in the Ticino, was full of portentous echoes about the deteriorating human condition. Thus one can hardly help reading Bluebeard for its overtones,...
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