Winner of the 2007 Allbooks Review Editor's Choice Award: The i Tetralogy—i, I Am Gunther, Gunther's Lament, Gunther Redux—is the gut-wrenching epic depiction of the dehumanization of man through an incisive observation of three pivotal characters. Each of them, victim, perpetrator, and murderer's son, is inextricably linked by the varying dimensions of their moral nature. Assaying the monumental impact of the Holocaust, this species-devastating event, the tetralogy elucidates a truth about humanity: the Holocaust has forever defined the species as indelibly damaged, capable on a molecular level of killing and consuming its own kind. The reader experiences this unvarnished—perhaps axiomatic—truth about humanity, which no revisionist can deny. The reader also ponders the risk in forgetting, in sanitizing, in sweetening the Holocaust.Powerfully penetrating with an incisive perspective into the lives of victims of the Holocaust, Nazi perpetrators, and those who remained damaged long after the event, Freese captures the immediacy of internal self-devastation by his remarkable use of first-person point of view. In this vivid way the far-reaching effects and intensely psychological impact of this epochal event are realized in the lives of three different characters—death camp inmate, Nazi guard, and the guard's son.