Victim, Witness, Resister: A Phenomenological Study of the Child Figure in Dystopian Fiction (Anthony Burgess, Kazuo Ishiguro, Cormac McCarthy, Suzanne Collins, Margaret Atwood)

The article investigates the child figure in dystopian fiction as one consciousness that passes through three positions: victim, witness and resister. The study combines the phenomenology of E. Husserl and M. Merleau-Ponty with comparative-typological close reading of A. Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, K. Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, C. McCarthy’s The Road, S. Collins’s The Hunger Games and M. Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments. Three working concepts are proposed: the expropriated body (the conversion of the child’s lived body into a resource of the state), the naive epoché (the child’s involuntary suspension of ideological self-evidence) and the confiscated protention (the closing of the child’s future horizon). The results show that in each text the three positions belong to a single figure or a single line of descent and are best described as phases of Merleau-Ponty’s intentional arc. The discussion relates these findings to Uzbek and Central Asian literature, and offers a detailed reading of Abdulla Kahhor’s autobiographical novella O‘tmishdan ertaklar as a realistic counterpart of the dystopian child, with reference also to Gafur Gulom, Oybek, Xudoyberdi Toxtaboyev, Chingiz Aitmatov and contemporary Uzbek prose.