Literature of refusal: protagonism and resistance

Abstract

The focus of this paper is the writer of stories whose protagonist is a child or young person in need to somehow understand the world surrounding them and find meaning for their life. They need to reject values, certainties and myths and invent a credible universe of their own instead, often needing to do this on their own. The protagonist – in the Greek sense of the word: protos (first) and agonistes (to agonize) – finds themselves in a desert, desperate, but in search of creation as a chance of survival. The randomly selected literary works serve to illustrate the distinct resistance in face of the world.