The eye of the Other in Piotr Siemion’s novel Niskie Łąki

Abstract

Piotr Siemion’s novel 'Niskie łąki' (2000) has been acknowledged by the critics as one of the most interesting texts depicting the experience of the generation of young Poles during the political breakthrough in the 1980s and 1990s. The author focuses on the Polish path to capitalism and deconstructs the key myths of that period, namely the experience of martial law, emigration for work and the birth of the free market. The paper discusses the multidimensional structure of the novel and stresses the role of the main character as the Other (the Other One). Employing this figure allows the author to maintain a distance from the described reality and to impartially look at it from the outside. The eye of the Other seems to function as a camera recording only facts and confronting them with the ‘norm’ that is in his consciousness. From this viewpoint, no character of the novel is an unblemished man, because the reality is changing all the time and old myths are being replaced by new ones. As a result, the novel seems to be an acute image of Poland in times of change.