Abstract
This study contains an interpretation of two novels written by Bohumil Hrabal, Too Loud a Solitude and Harlequin's Millions, focusing on the poetic rendition of the old age on the background of certain idea about human life as well as an experience and reflection of the old age in the consciousness of main characters. In these novels there are two concepts of the run of human life: in Too Loud a Solitude it is a dynamic and dialectical opposition of youth and old age characterizing individual human life, but also the dynamics of historical development; in Harlequin's Millions we can find the traditional concept of human life as a circle analogous to the seasons and months of the year.
Haňťa, hero of Too Loud a Solitude, is living either through his memories, or through by his work, by which he is being ritually placed beyond the framework of time. Marie, protagonist of Harlequin's Millions, also lives in her memories, and though she emphatically and with interest perceives her surroundings and day to day events in a retirement home, she does not live in the real spacetime, because her imagination transforms her reality so much, so that it becomes an intricately constructed and strongly contrarealistic fiction.