Title: The Dilemmas of Modernity in the Local Narrative of Jon Fosse’s Vaim

Abstract: The “Vaim trilogy,” recently published by the Norwegian writer Jon Fosse who was laureated with the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature, takes the Norwegian fishing village of Vaim as its shared narrative space and reflects the dilemmas of modernity through a mode of local narrative. As the first part of the trilogy published in 2025, Vaim depicts three interrelated predicaments faced by the modern individual in relation to society, others, and the self. First, the rupture between the individual and society is manifested in the alienation of the hometown and the experience of urban estrangement generated by the solidification of local spatial structures. Second, the impasse between the self and others emerges in the breakdown of intimate relationship and the failure of linguistic communication within the routines of everyday local life. Third, the loss of the self is revealed through the dissolution of subjectivity and existential alienation caused by locally constituted identities. The local narrative embeds macro-level modernity issues into micro-level experiences, achieving a thematic leap from the “local” to the “global.”

Keywords: Jon Fosse, Vaim, local narrative, dilemmas of modernity

Authors: Rui Kong, Professor, School of Foreign Languages, Shanxi Normal University, Taiyuan, Shanxi, China; Xinhua Xing, School of Foreign Languages, Shanxi Normal University, Taiyuan, Shanxi, China.

DOI: 10.19967/j.cnki.flc.2026.02.006