The Power of One

Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses racism, racist violence, and the Holocaust.

The Power of One is a Bildungsroman: a novel of becoming. The Bildungsroman is a literary genre that follows the social and moral development of a protagonist from childhood to adulthood, demonstrating their process of maturation from innocence to experience as the character learns to integrate into society. Adolescent protagonists who are frustrated by seemingly arbitrary and illogical rules or cultural norms are a common feature of the genre. Memoirs are often examples of the Bildungsroman, but the genre is not limited to either non-fiction or fiction. Additionally, there are several sub-genres of the Bildungsroman including the Entwicklungsroman, or a novel that depicts the growth of the main protagonist without transitioning into adulthood, and the Küntslerroman, a novel that depicts the development of an artist.

In The Power of One, Peekay’s experiences are set against the long history of racism that establishes Apartheid rule: the minority rule of the white population through institutionalized racial segregation in South Africa and Namibia from the late 1940s until the early 1990s. Peekay navigates the social complexities of race and power during this period.