scholarly journals Poetics of Narrative in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Novel “A Pale View of Hills”

2019 ◽  
pp. 57-64
Author(s):  
Yaryna Oprisnyk
Keyword(s):  
Current Paper ◽  
First Person ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Psychological Processes ◽  
Narrative Strategies ◽  
Verbal Expression ◽  
Verbal Language ◽  
Japanese Aesthetics ◽  
Narrative Techniques

The current paper explores the narrative strategies and poetics of intermediality in Kazuo Ishiguro’s first novel “A Pale View of Hills” (1982). Particular attention is paid to the notions of narrative unreliability and subjectivity exemplified by the ambiguous first-person narrative in the novel. The researcher focuses on the narrative techniques, as well as on the numerous lexical and other literary means that emphasize the unreliability of the narrator, who is also the protagonist. It allows revealing the hidden emotions and tendency to self-deceit. In addition, the paper traces the features of Japanese aesthetics and literature in the novel. The most peculiar among them are concise verbal expression, lack of emotion, and audiovisuality, which is primary concentration of the narrative on the visual and auditory images, rather than on the characters’ internal psychological processes. A range of narrative strategies and special literary effects in “A Pale View of Hills”, being characteristic for the art of cinematography, make the novel a vivid example of the cinematographic (cinematic) literature, which requires a different, more image-oriented perception of the reader. Among such techniques, the most notable are the enhanced symbolism of sensual images; revealing the characters’ actual feelings and thoughts through their non-verbal language and dialogues; fragmented and elliptic nature of the narrative that resembles the technique of montage; and the plasticity of chronotope, which is represented by the active use of flashbacks in the novel.

scholarly journals Anachronisms in Charles Dickens’s ‘Great Expectations’: A Case Study Based on Gerard Genette’s Structural Narratology: الإيقاع الزمني في رواية تشارلز ديكنز "آمال عظيمة" دراسة حالة في ضوء تقنيات السرد البنائي عند جيرارد جينيت

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (14) ◽  
pp. 130-117
Author(s):  
Rajaa Radwan Hilles Rajaa Radwan Hilles
Keyword(s):  
Linear Order ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Current Paper ◽  
First Person ◽  
Logical Relation ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Great Expectations ◽  
Sequence Of Events

This paper deals with the narrative order of time in Charles Dickens’s novel Great Expectations. Time is crucial in narratological structure as it establishes a logical relation for events in the narrative. Besides, a narrative develops its point of view through the voices in the narrative. This point of view is called focalization. This paper assumes that the sequence of events in Dickens’s Great Expectations does not follow a linear order and consequently, the point of focalization changes throughout the narrative. Accordingly, the current paper intends to investigate the order of narration in the novel. It intends to explore the ultimate thematic concern of the novel as well. The discussion will be in the light of Gerard Genette’s narratological structure and will be applied on Dickens’s Great Expectations. It is the 13th novel in his independent literary works. It has been published unillustrated in 36 weekly instalments in All the Year Round from 1860 through 1861. Then, it has been published in three volumes by Chapman & Hall in1861. The narrative voice has a great impact on the story’s timeline and on the readers because it is narrated in the first-person voice by the protagonist, Philip Pirrip. (Davis, 2007: P 126) The analysis is based on Genette’s theorization of time order in telling a story and communicating a broader point of view that the author intends to make throughout the whole narrative structure.

A Compact Embodiment of Pluralities and Denial of Origins: Atwood’s The Year of The Flood

2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 141
Author(s):  
Rana Sağıroğlu
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Margaret Atwood ◽  
Rapid Change ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The World ◽  
Narrative Techniques ◽  
Why Questions ◽  
Near Future

Margaret Atwood, one of the most spectacular authors of postmodern movement, achieved to unite debatable and in demand critical points of 21st century such as science fiction, postmodernism and ecocriticism in the novel The Year of The Flood written in 2009. The novel could be regarded as an ecocritical manifesto and a dystopic mirror against today’s degenerated world, tending to a superficial base to keep the already order in use, by moving away from the fundamental solution of all humanity: nature. Although Atwood does not want her works to be called science fiction, it is obvious that science fiction plays an introductory role and gives the novel a ground explaining all ‘why’ questions of the novel. However, Atwood is not unjust while claiming that her works are not science fiction because of the inevitable rapid change of 21st century world becoming addicted to technology, especially Internet. It is easily observed by the reader that what she fictionalises throughout the novel is quite close to possibility, and the world may witness in the near future what she creates in the novel as science fiction. Additionally, postmodernism serves to the novel as the answerer of ‘how’ questions: How the world embraces pluralities, how heterogeneous social order is needed, and how impossible to run the world by dichotomies of patriarchal social order anymore. And lastly, ecocriticism gives the answers of ‘why’ questions of the novel: Why humanity is in chaos, why humanity has organized the world according to its own needs as if there were no living creatures apart from humanity. Therefore, The Year of The Flood meets the reader as a compact embodiment of science fiction, postmodernism and ecocriticism not only with its theme, but also with its narrative techniques.

The use of second person pronouns in a literary work

2014 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Helen de Hoop ◽  
Lotte Hogeweg
Keyword(s):  
Literary Work ◽  
First Person ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Main Character ◽  
Second Person ◽  
Person Pronoun

AbstractFor this study we investigated all occurrences of Dutch second person pronoun subjects in a literary novel, and determined their interpretation. We found two patterns that can both be argued to be functionally related to the de-velopment of the story. First, we found a decrease in the generic use of second person, a decrease which we believe goes hand in hand with an increased distancing of oneself as a reader from the narrator/main character. Second, we found an increase in the use of the descriptive second person. The increased descriptive use of second person pronouns towards the end of the novel is very useful for the reader, because the information provided by the first person narrator himself becomes less and less reliable. Thus, the reader depends more strongly on information provided by other characters and what these characters tell the narrator about himself.

Divi pirmās personas stāstījumi Osvalda Zebra romānā „Māra”

2021 ◽  
pp. 197-208
Author(s):  
Daiga Zirnīte
Keyword(s):  
Young Woman ◽  
Personal Growth ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The Other ◽  
Internal Conflict ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
First Person ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Growth Path ◽  
Dramatic Structure

The aim of the study is to define how and to what effect the first-person narrative form is used in Oswald Zebris’s novel “Māra” (2019) and how the other elements of the narrative support it. The analysis of the novel employs both semiotic and narratological ideas, paying in-depth attention to those elements of the novel’s structure that can help the reader understand the growth path and power of the heroine Māra, a 16-year-old young woman entangled in external and internal conflict. As the novel is predominantly written from the title character’s point of view, as she is the first-person narrator in 12 of the 16 chapters of the novel, the article reveals the principle of chapter arrangement, the meaning of the second first-person narrator (in four novel chapters) and the main points of the dramatic structure of the story. Although in interviews after the publication of the novel, the author Zebris has emphasised that he has written the novel about a brave girl who at her 16 years is ready to make the decisions necessary for her personal growth, her open, candid, and emotionally narrated narrative creates inner resistance in readers, especially the heroine’s peers, and therefore makes it difficult to observe and appreciate her courage and the positive metamorphosis in the dense narrative of the heroine’s feelings, impressions, memories, imaginary scenes, various impulses and comments on the action. It can be explained by the form of narration that requires the reader to identify with the narrator; however, it is cumbersome if the narrator’s motives, details, and emotions, expressed openly and honestly, are unacceptable, incomprehensible, or somehow exaggerated.

Helping the novel: Neoliberalism, self-help, and the narrating of the self in Mohsin Hamid’s How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

2016 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 139-150 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angelia Poon
Keyword(s):  
Modern Technology ◽  
The Self ◽  
Individual Choice ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Historical Contingency ◽  
Narrative Strategies ◽  
Important Place ◽  
Realist Novel ◽  
Self Help ◽  
Vantage Points

Self-help books sell the myth of self-determinism, empowerment and the eternal hope of reinvention, reasons no doubt for their enormous popularity. In this article, I examine Pakistani-born Mohsin Hamid’s latest novel, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (2013) which, with its catchy, hyperbolic title signalling its masquerade as a self-help book, openly and ironically advertises itself as a satire. The object of the novel’s satire is the capitalist, neoliberal notion of the self that is predicated on an overweening sense of control and complete agency. Neoliberal subjectivity endorses the care and transformation of the self in order to take best advantage of a market economy, since the means to achieving material affluence is seen simply as a matter of individual choice and personal will. In the novel, Hamid brings into productive tension the conventions and assumptions of the self-help genre with those of the more traditional realist novel in order to interrogate not just the neoliberal self but the very ways in which the self is narrated and constructed. Engaging in particular with the affordances of technology in his novel as a thematic, Hamid appropriates the vantage points and perspectival positions made possible by modern technology to undermine the solipsistic self of the self-help book. He further exploits the narrative energies of the novel form to foreground a sense of historical contingency to lay bare various modes of self-constitution and self-narration. Through his use of metatextual narrative strategies, Hamid raises fundamental questions about the genre of the novel itself and the ways in which it is intimately invested in the insinuation of the development of a self. These questions, I argue, ultimately underline his affirmation of the novel’s important place and the ethical role it can play at this contemporary moment of late and global capitalism.

scholarly journals Boden Black (A Novel) and With Axe and Pen in the New Zealand Alps: Differences Between Overseas and New Zealand Written Accounts of Climbing Mount Cook 1882-1920 and the Emergence of a New Zealand Voice in Mountaineering Literature

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Jura Fearnley
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Family Members ◽  
Southern Alps ◽  
Critical Study ◽  
First Person ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Writing Style ◽  
Natural Landscape ◽  
Site Specific ◽  
Mackenzie Basin

<p>This thesis has two components: creative and critical. The creative component is the novel Boden Black. It is a first person narrative, imagined as a memoir, and traces the life of its protagonist, Boden Black, from his childhood in the late 1930s to adulthood in the present day. The plot describes various significant encounters in the narrator’s life: from his introduction to the Mackenzie Basin and the Mount Cook region in the South Island of New Zealand, through to meetings with mountaineers and ‘lost’ family members. Throughout his journey from child to butcher to poet, Boden searches for ways to describe his response to the natural landscape. The critical study is titled With Axe and Pen in the New Zealand Alps. It examines the published writing of overseas and New Zealand mountaineers climbing at Aoraki/Mount Cook between 1882 and 1920. I advance the theory that there are stylistic differences between the writing of overseas and New Zealand mountaineers and that the beginning of a distinct New Zealand mountaineering voice can be traced back to the first accounts written by New Zealand mountaineers attempting to reach the summit of Aoraki/Mount Cook. The first mountaineer to attempt to climb Aoraki/Mount Cook was William Spotswood Green, an Irishman who introduced high alpine climbing to New Zealand in 1882. Early New Zealand mountaineers initially emulated the conventions of British mountaineering literature as exemplified by Green and other famous British mountaineers. These pioneering New Zealand mountaineers attempted to impose the language of the ‘civilised’ European alpine-world on to the ‘uncivilised’ world of the Southern Alps. However, as New Zealand mountaineering became more established at Aoraki/Mount Cook from the 1890s through to 1920, a distinct New Zealand voice developed in mountaineering literature: one that is marked by a sense of connection to place expressed through site-specific, factual observation and an unadorned, sometimes laconic, vernacular writing style.</p>

scholarly journals Laila Lalami’s The Moor’s Account: A Lost Narrative

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (7) ◽  
pp. 29-40
Author(s):  
Sanaila Ghufran
Keyword(s):  
Women Characters ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Current Paper ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Historical Account ◽  
Islamic Culture ◽  
African Slave ◽  
Muslim Population ◽  
Cabeza De Vaca ◽  
Western Woman

From the earlier times the voices of the minorities especially the Muslims have been subjugated by the forces. Many of the texts written in the olden times, whether fictional or non-fictional hardly have any mention of Muslims in them. One such text being the historical account of the Narvaez expedition that took place in 1527, which was chronicled by Cabeza de Vaca, one of the four survivors of the expedition. What is surprising is that one of the survivors was an African slave, Estabanico but he is hardly mentioned in the original, despite being part of the expedition that stretched to eight year. Fast forward to the 21st century which is the age of postcolonialism and where the once oppressed communities are finally speaking about their truth, Moroccan author, Laila Lalami through her novel, The Moor’s Account decided to give voice and a backstory to the African slave, Estabanico. The current paper deals with the complexities of the novel and tries to provide reasons as to why Cabeza de Vaca intentionally omitted the Estabanico’s account of the travels. The paper also discusses the ingenuine use of narrative tools made by the author in the retelling of the story of a forgotten Muslim slave. It also narrates the importance of women characters in the Islamic culture of those days, when the western woman was not as liberated as she is today. Lastly, the paper draws a parallel between Estabanico’s condition during the expedition and that of the Muslim population in the post 9/11 world.

scholarly journals Let It Go: Multicultural Society in Los by Tom Naegels

Werkwinkel ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 65-88
Author(s):  
Timothy Pareit
Keyword(s):  
The Netherlands ◽  
Literary Theory ◽  
Current Paper ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Multicultural Society ◽  
Personal Story ◽  
Literary Theories

Abstract Although scholars in the Netherlands have already attempted to integrate literary theories on migration with the specific Dutch context, none such attempts have so far been made for Flemish literature. The current paper therefore scrutinises the novel Los by Tom Naegels, an (autobiographical) account of the riots in Borgerhout (Antwerp) after the murder on Islam teacher Mohamed Achrak in 2002. As the author also covered these events as a journalist, the analysis investigates the manner in which this topical matter is intertwined with the more personal story about the struggle conducted by Naegels’s grandfather for euthanasia. The paper leans on Jérôme Meizoz’s posture theory, which differentiates the author figure from the biographical person and the narrator. In addition, the novel is situated within the contemporary literary return towards realism and Flemish literature’s negotiation of Flemish identity. By focussing on these three elements – the theme of migration, realism and Flemish identity – the paper attempts to contribute to the development of a literary theory on migration in Flanders.

scholarly journals Gæst hos virkeligheden. Sprogets landflygtighed i "Løgneren" af Martin A. Hansen og "Det svundne er en drøm" af Aksel Sandemose

2018 ◽  
pp. 116-131
Author(s):  
Jørgen Veisland
Keyword(s):  
Migratory Birds ◽  
First Person ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Compelling Evidence ◽  
The Past ◽  
To Come

Central motifs and episodes form interesting and significant links between Aksel Sandemose’s novel Det svundne er en drøm, published in 1946, and Martin A. Hansen’s novel from 1950, Løgneren. The motifs of truth versus lie, and the intermingling of the two, and of the split subject, manifest themselves in the protagonists who share a common first name, Johannes. The texts are an attempt to write diaries that transcend the borderline between past and present, fiction and reality, truth and lying. The diary form, composed in the first person as an alternative to the novel form proper, is viewed by both protagonists as an experiment that questions the ability of language to portray reality accurately and truthfully. Furthermore, the diaries break with chronology in order to come to terms with a darkness within, an essentially unknown, demonic territory that prevents knowledge and truth from emerging. Central episodes in the two diaries are practically identical, e.g. the drowning accident that takes place in both texts, the absence of the ‘I’ of the diary from home, and the sense of alienation from home. Additionally, significant symbols recur in both texts, e.g. a necklace and migratory birds. The protagonists’ relationships to women are all but identical and involve an examination of the past and of guilt that becomes a potential key to resolving what constitutes guilt, conscience, home and exile. The two texts form an intertext and there is compelling evidence pointing to Sandemose’s diary having profoundly influenced Hansen’s narrative.

Multiple Narratives in the Novel

2019 ◽  
pp. 23-38
Author(s):  
Deepra Dandekar
Keyword(s):  
Life Stories ◽  
Religious Conversion ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Important Case ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Narrative Strategies ◽  
Christian Morality ◽  
Strong Statement ◽  
Emotional Representations

The politics of a multilayered text like The Subhedar’s Son does not lie in its strong statement of ideological issues but in its silences and its emotional representations. Dinkar Shankar Sawarkar, the author of The Subhedar’s Son, deliberately connected Christian morality with specific social groups, according them relative political significance, while disregarding others as morally and spiritually bankrupt. This chapter discusses the various narrative strategies employed by Sawakar in the Marathi novel. It explores how The Subhedar’s Son is simultaneously a Christian narrative and a Brahmin narrative that makes an important case for the Brahmin-Christian contribution to vernacular nativism and nationalism, against colonialism. The chapter describes how the novel stages religious conversion to Christianity as a modern and individualist Brahmin and upper-caste decision, the analysis of which cannot be afforded within structural explorations, but personal motivations and life stories.

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