SOURCE: Morgan, Peter. “Georges Kien and the ‘Diagnosis of Delusion’ in Elias Canetti's Die Blendung.¹” Neophilologus 76, no. 1 (January 1992): 77-89.

In the following essay, Morgan examines the roles of irony and “narrative self-reflexion” in Die Blendung.

Since the republication of Elias Canetti's Die Blendung in the early 1960s, interpreters have asked whether a resolution is posited between the extremes of “Kopf” and “Welt,” or at least whether it is possible to find a perspective in the novel on Peter Kien's crisis. The figure of Georges Kien, Peter's brother, the psychiatrist, who in the last section of the novel saves Peter from his humiliation at the hands of Therese and Pfaff, has become central to this question in the critical literature on Die Blendung. Georges dominates the third part of the novel and appears to represent—and restores sanity and order in an otherwise grotesque and senseless world. While Raymond...