The question of guilt and resonsibility in Pierre Assouline's 'The Client'

Abstract

This paper is a reflection on the problem of communicating and judging individual guilt, based on Pierre Assouline’s novel The Client – a story of a woman who during the war denounced a Jewish family to the police. Assouline’s narrative, structured as a first-person inquiry about the past, brings about a series of questions concerning individual responsibility, the need to settle the past, and the rights to judge others’ decisions and actions from the past. Arguing for the importance of public dialogue in settling the past, the author of the article discusses Hannah Arendt’s concept of the responsibility of conscience.