Proceedings of the 2025 5th International Conference on Education, Language and Art (ICELA 2025)

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The Narrative Labyrinths in the Debriefing: Collected Stories by Susan Sontag

Authors
Zhai Jiang1, *
1School of Chinese Language and Literature, Shaanxi Normal University, Add: No.620, West Chang’an, X’i an, China
*Corresponding author. Email: 378925634@qq.com
Corresponding Author
Zhai Jiang
Available Online 15 February 2026.
DOI
10.2991/978-94-6463-988-9_25How to use a DOI?
Keywords
Narrative Labyrinths; Debriefing; Collected Stories; Susan Sontag
Abstract

Susan Sontag is an American writer and critic who grew up after the World War II. She is a “thinker” as well as a “fighter”, and “one of the most outstanding writers of our time”. Throughout her career, Sontag wrote seven anthologies. This paper takes the short story collection Debriefing as the research object, and analyzes the narrative labyrinths in the short story collection from the aspects of time labyrinths, space labyrinths and characters labyrinths. This paper also points out the strategic significance under the narrative labyrinths skills--using the narrative labyrinths to imply the world is a big labyrinth, in which people live extremely absurd lives. Although people living in this absurd world can never escape from the labyrinths, they never give up struggle. Thus, we can find that there is hidden concern for reality and human nature with a strong humanistic care beneath the surface of the writer’s pioneering experiments. We can not only dig out the distinctive and profound significance of the times in her works, but also explore some spiritual connotation beyond the times and race.

Copyright
© 2026 The Author(s)
Open Access
Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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Volume Title
Proceedings of the 2025 5th International Conference on Education, Language and Art (ICELA 2025)
Series
Advances in Social Science, Education and Humanities Research
Publication Date
15 February 2026
ISBN
978-94-6463-988-9
ISSN
2352-5398
DOI
10.2991/978-94-6463-988-9_25How to use a DOI?
Copyright
© 2026 The Author(s)
Open Access
Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

Cite this article

risenwbib
TY  - CONF
AU  - Zhai Jiang
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/02/15
TI  - The Narrative Labyrinths in the Debriefing: Collected Stories by Susan Sontag
BT  - Proceedings of the 2025 5th International Conference on Education, Language and Art (ICELA 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 207
EP  - 216
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6463-988-9_25
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6463-988-9_25
ID  - Jiang2026
ER  -