The Fictional World of Garshin and Borchert: "the Red Flower" and "the Dandelion"‪.‬

Vsevolod Garshin's "The Red Flower" ("Krasnyi tsvetok" 1883) and Wolfgang Borchert's "The Dandelion" ("Die Hundeblume" 1947) are famous stories with remarkably similar structures, yet as far as I know they have not received a comparative treatment. In Garshin's story an asylum patient believes some red poppies are the keepers of the world's evil and he decides to break from his watchful guardians and pluck the poppies to save the world. In Borchert's story a prisoner, repressed from performing any act of self-expression, reaches outside his tightly guarded daily routine to pluck a dandelion and, thus, redeem his sense of individuality and life. On first glance, the stories share obvious traits: the titles are common flora and represent the goal of the protagonists' quests; the stories are set in an institution where anonymity of patient and prisoner is the norm; the protagonists have not chosen to be there; the stories focus on an existence of solitude; and, in both stories the minds of the protagonists uniquely empower seemingly insignificant flowers, an empowerment which reveals awareness and action that distinguish the characters' individual domains. Perhaps most apparently, both characters come to act in a manner best defined as unreasonable. Certainly, Anthony Storr's generalization, "when solitary confinement is accompanied by threats, uncertainty, lack of sleep and other measures, the victim may surfer disruption of normal mental function without being able to muster any compensatory reintegration" (Storr 42), could explain this bent for unreason. Yet, these two character portraits are subject to different, and individual, world conditions. The aims of this paper are to clarify these world conditions, underscore the different ways in which Garshin and Borchert employ similar structures, devices, and motifs, and account for the unreason that might explain the protagonists' exceptional desire. One-person worlds