Idividual And Collective Memory In Search Of Identity In Gazmend Kapllani’s Works

Abstract

Purpose: This paper examines the relationship between individual and collective memory in the construction of exilic identity in Gazmend Kapllani’s novels The Worst of One’s Own Self (2018) and The Last Page (2021). It aims at identifying the narrative strategies through which mnemonic processes shape individual and collective selfhood in the context of the Albanian diaspora.

Methodology: The study employs a comparative literary method grounded in qualitative close reading by combining Ricœur’s (2003) narrative identity theory, Halbwachs’s (1992) collective memory framework, Fisher’s (1984) narrative paradigm, and Bakhtin’s (1981) concepts of dialogism and chronotope, as operationalized through Genette’s (1980) narratological categories.

Findings: The analysis demonstrates that individual memory in Kapllani’s fiction functions not as a static archive but as a [1]continuous process of interpretation and reinterpretation, shaped by trauma, exile, and ideological pressure. Both novels mobilize memory as a narrative strategy for constructing a cultural, historical, and individual identity, in which the alienated subject negotiates selfhood across fractured temporal and spatial configurations. The narrative techniques of dialogism and chronotopic displacement are identified as the principal mechanisms through which personal memory is transformed into collective cultural testimony.

Originality: This study represents the first systematic application of a combined Ricœurian–Bakhtinian framework to Kapllani’s two post-2015 novels, addressing a gap in existing scholarship, which has focused predominantly on his earlier memoir works and has not engaged with the narratological dimension of mnemonic identity construction in his fiction.