Ethics and Identity in David Albahari’s Bait: A Ricœurian Reading

Serbian author David Albahari’s novel Bait has been examined thematically in relation to masculinities, history, war, trauma, memory, and ethics. Bait’s style has been analyzed through the lens of postmodernism, with particular attention to its structural fracture and contradiction. This article provides a Ricœurian and rhetorical analysis, contending that the novel enacts the ethics of narrating another’s life from a belated postmemorial perspective. Drawing primarily on Paul Ricœur’s theories of memory, testimony, translation, and narrative identity, as well as Jeffrey Blustein’s moral philosophy of memory and Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory, the study first reconstructs the “ethical locations” of the three principal characters: Mother as moral witness, the narrator as proxy witness, and Donald as ethical mentor. Subsequently, a rhetorical analysis examines how the novel allocates reliability and authority among the characters, the audience, and the implied author, thereby illuminating the novel’s ethical implications on multiple levels.