SOURCE: Trousdale, Rachel. “Self-Invention in Isak Dinesen's ‘The Deluge at Norderney’.” Scandinavian Studies 74, no. 2 (summer 2002): 205-22.

In the following essay, Trousdale argues that the embedded stories within “The Deluge at Norderney” are not only tales of self-invention, but also of re-creation.

Isak Dinesen's “The Deluge at Norderney” (1934) is a tale about self-invention and its role in resisting the impositions of others.¹ Characters who invent themselves based upon artistic models find that the results of their inventions can far exceed their models; in a startling move away from the usual sequence of events, the most successful characters become idealized versions of their flawed originals. The similar activity of rewriting the past has a still more dramatically redemptive result: it allows Miss Malin Nat-og-Dag to go to her grave a free and happy woman. In the moment of death, memory and fantasy are indistinguishable, and the characters' masquerades become true...