In this thesis, by means of a phenomenologically inspired reading I argue that the relationship drama of Djuna Barnes’s modernist novel Nightwood (1936) is marked by the experience of Estrangement. This Estrangement is due to the characters’ constant and inevitable recognition of their bodies, i.e., their physical constitution or embodied state of being in the world. The characters of the novel deploy different strategies of defying Estrangement or keeping it at bay, either by staying fully in the present or running away from it. However, the constant confrontation with the past, the permanent and inescapable constitution in the present and the future unchangeability of the characters’ physical predicaments affect them, and the reader, in a significant way. The characters are socially and historically constituted beings who cannot escape their own existence. As a reader, you get a direct experience of the constraint on part of the characters from within rather than from a distance.

There is above all a desire on the part of the novel’s main characters to get away from their own history, which they nevertheless always carry with them, and to reach a state of absolute potentiality. Estrangement is a matter of a strong faith in the remnants of a prehistoric past when their destiny was still not determined. It is however impossible to embrace prehistory other than as a beacon of the unknown for the simple reason that the characters cannot experience or posit an existence before or by another species than that which constitutes them in the world. What the novel more specifically makes visible is thus the impossibility of prehistorical consciousness or a consciousness a priori or before history as these characters know it. Trying to identify with something outside of themselves rather worsens the confusion and leads the characters of Nightwood astray. Estrangement is ultimately found in the characters’ loss of themselves.