Food, Texts and Types of Hunger in Jodi Picoult’s The Storyteller

Abstract

In the media, the theme of the Holocaust has always been most powerfully illustrated visually,
with images or videos depicting skeletal human beings on the verge of becoming twodimensional, almost transparent. In the remaining footage of WWII horrors, one can see that
those Jews who were kept in Nazi prisoner camps, and who were lucky enough not to be gassed
on arrival, still had to cope with the scarcity—or even total lack—of food, which would
eventually turn them into living skeletons. In literature, the theme of the Holocaust has been
approached differently, with writers constantly striving to find the best words and phrases to
appropriately describe the bodily sensations of those for whom food had almost become an
intangible item. This paper intends to show how Jodi Picoult’s novel The Storyteller (2013)
manages to make its readers mentally visualise the horrors of the Holocaust through the close
interconnectedness of (at least) two types of hunger: the physical hunger for food that might
enable prisoners to survive another day, and the hunger for texts and stories, which nourish the
mind and soul. The pursuit of justice, as well as the need for absolution from guilt, are other
types of hunger that this paper analyses, with a view towards a more applied approach within
the scope of the study