Abstract
<jats:p>In the novel the House of Memory and Oblivion, Philip David questions the origin and nature of evil and tries to understand how it is possible to live in a world that allowed the Holocaust and the suffering of innocent people. Aware of the imperfection of human nature, man’s weakness and humility in the face of the «terrifying commonness of evil» (Freud), the author tries to fathom, at least as much as it is possible for one person, the surprising connections between the evil experienced, memory, forgetting and language. In attempts to liberate man from self-hatred and guilt without sin, interpretations related to the reconstruction of intimate experiences and the deconstruction of language and post-traumatic discourse were born. Similar to Kish, combining fiction and autobiographical reading, David opts for painting individual destinies, confessions and traumatic experiences that confirm that evil exists, lurks, waits for its moment and at the same time successfully evades all attempts to be objectified or expressed in existing language. Through semantic analysis, the work aims to answer the question of the strength and limitations of language and to decipher how this novel becomes a kind of testimony to the author’s utopian idea of creating a «new language» as the strongest possible defense against evil.</jats:p>