The Stance of the Writer in a Teenager’s Book: Mircea Eliade’s Romanul Adolescentului Miop
The Stance of the Writer in a Teenager’s Book: Mircea Eliade’s Romanul Adolescentului Miop

Summary/Abstract: This paper focuses on the strategies used by Mircea Eliade in his teenage years as a writer in order to construct an image of himself in his fictional text Romanul adolescentului miop. The author experimentally used literary devices to which we refer today as “self-insertion” or “author surrogate,” resulting in a metanovel. One of the first books that Eliade wrote, Romanul adolescentului miop was not published until 1989, although it was a teenage project, to which the mature author frequently refers on several occasions and whose formula he adapts in some of his most appreciated writings. Romanul adolescentului miop’s destiny was inauspicious: although written before André Gide’s Les Faux-monnayeurs [The Counterfeiters], it remained unknown for decades in which Romanian literature saw drastic changes. Despite its flaws, the novel challenges the reader through an ingenious mixture of two narrative styles: the confessions of a diarist and the constructions of a novelist. Therefore, the reader is successively (and constantly) perceiving two different images of the author in Eliade’s text: the glorious posture that he constructs for the public eye (mainly his classmates) and the actual, troubled young author, simultaneously consumed by great ambitions and the dread that he will fail and his struggles are futile.

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