Anthony Trollope’s Dystopian Novel “The Fixed Period”: a Look at the Present through the Future

Abstract

The article analyzes one of the late novels of the English writer, which paints a very pessimistic picture of the future, moving the reader to 1980 and to the fictional country of Britannula, whose parliament at the dawn of independence from Britain adopted a law according to which every resident of the republic who has reached the age of 68 years is obliged to undergo voluntary euthanasia, so as not to burden a happy and a prosperous country with unnecessary material and other expenses and thus contribute to the prosperity of the motherland. However, the practice of implementing the law is difficult, since some representatives of society oppose its conduct and seek help from the former metropolis, which suspends not only the operation of the law by military pressure, but also colonizes Britannula again. The narrative is constructed as a manuscript of a book by the deposed president of the republic, in which he, a fanatic of such bringing everyone to happiness and prosperity, gives his interpretation of events. The work is a futuristic dystopian novel in which the genre and narrative experiments of the writer and his inherent psychologism and irony coexist in an interesting and original way, but not always successfully.