Literature and Politics

Aris Alexandrou’s novel The Mission Box is a masterpiece of Greek literature and the most important novel about the civil war that broke out in the aftermath of World War II. I will approach the political significance of the novel through the notion of utopia. Dimitris Rautopoulos distinguishes between two kinds of utopia in Aris Alexandrou’s novel. There is, on the one hand, the “autarchic” or totalitarian utopia (300) that characterizes the structure of the Communist Party during the Civil War as well the society described in a play presented in the novel, and on the hand, Alexandrou’s own “anarchic utopia” whose chief characteristic was the opposition to any form of oppression (242). I will interrogate these two forms of utopia through the figure of suicide that is extremely prevalent throughout the novel.