SOURCE: Koepke, Wulf. “Retreat into Prehistory.” World Literature Today 60, no. 4 (autumn 1986): 585-88.

In the following essay, Koepke finds parallels between several of Frisch's narrators and protagonists.

Herr Geiser, the narrator and protagonist of Der Mensch erscheint im Holozän (1979; Eng. Man in the Holocene),¹ is in a situation customary for Max Frisch's first-person narrators: he is in a place from which he cannot escape and is forced to take stock of his existence—past, present, and future. Stiller was confined to a comfortable Swiss prison and compelled to hear what others had to say about him; Walter Faber sits in the shade of an airplane in the Mexican desert and begins, very reluctantly, to become aware of his repressed past; in a more urbane way, the famous writer Max spends a weekend at a seaside resort in Montauk to relax with a woman companion and get away from...