Kerja Perawatan dan Pengakuan dalam Cerpen Wolfgang Borchert: Pembacaan Naratologis-Feminis

Abstract

Women's domestic care in Wolfgang Borchert's short fiction raises questions about agency, narrative mediation, and recognition. This article compares the representation of the wife in Das Brot and the mother in Die Küchenuhr through an interpretive qualitative design using comparative close reading. The analysis distinguishes bodily representation, access to interiority, speech representation, actions of care, and recognition within the story. Genette's narratology, Lanser's feminist account of narrative voice, and Beauvoir's account of situated subjectivity guide the interpretation. The findings identify two configurations of representation. In Das Brot, narration predominantly follows the wife while also providing access to the husband's thoughts. The wife's management of conversation and food distribution makes her deliberation available to readers without establishing equality within the relationship. In Die Küchenuhr, the mother's care is mediated through her adult son's retrospective account within a third-person frame narrative. His belated appreciation makes her contribution visible while leaving her own evaluation of that care largely inaccessible. These differences concern the representation of subjectivity rather than an absolute presence or absence of subjectivity. Both stories enable an ambivalent reading of domestic care as a meaningful practice whose costs and recognition remain unevenly distributed. The conclusions are restricted to these two texts and do not establish women's historical experience as a whole.