Childhood in the novel Sjećanje šume [Remembering Forest] by Damir Karakaš

By employing the analytic framework of psychemic, sociemic narrative figures in the novel, we conducted a detailed description of the characters, focusing particularly on the boy who also takes on the role of the novel’s protagonist. The study primarily examines the boy’s childhood, which appears to be marked by the relationship with his father. In addition to the father-son dynamic, the characterization of the central child figure is shaped by the roles of his peers and the social spaces that evolve as he matures, leading to his own transformation. The harshness of the Lika region is further accentuated by the conflict between rural and urban settings, which also contributes to the characterization of the protagonist. The antagonism between village and city, as well as the boy’s persistent sense of (non)belonging within dominant social figures (family / peer / village community), reveals one of the novel’s central ontemic figures – space. The study interprets the narrative realizations of space that structure the topos of childhood. This is primarily the forest, which, to the author, serves as a paradigmatic space viewed through an eschatological lens of equality and Foucault’s heterotopia of inverted values. This is followed by the real space(s) of the family home, interpreted through the concept of the topophilic microcosm of the boy’s childhood, and finally, the oneiric space (the domains of dreams and imagination) that functions for the purposes of constructing an alternative world in which the central (child) character confronts his fears and personal traumas.