The Father and the Animals. The Problem of Escape in „The Cinnamon Shops”

The article attempts to interpret the figure of the Father from “The Street of Crocodiles”. The author makes use of poststructuralist theories that allow him to read the father’s illness as a metamorphosis corresponding to the processes of becoming–animal and becoming–invisible. For this purpose, the concepts of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari are used, as is the work of Claire Colebrook, who popularized the thinking of these two philosophers. The Father’s disease, according to the article’s author, is seen as an escape to beyond what is human. Constituted by a multiplicity of desire and affect, his disease allows for an abandonment of the principles of realism and, thus, a crossing over into the realm of the absurd.