Bending Facts Within and Beyond the Borders of Unreliable Narration in Selected Novels by Kazuo Ishiguro and Max Frisch

Mgr. Zuzana Fonioková, Ph.D.

Doctoral thesis

Abstract:

Tato disertační práce se zabývá nespolehlivým vyprávěním a hranicí mezi touto narativní technikou a nepřirozeným vyprávěním v první osobě. Toto rozdělení je demonstrováno v analýzách vybraných románů britského spisovatele Kazua Ishigura a švýcarského autora Maxe Frische. Práce sleduje vývoj narativních strategií těchto autorů: oba používají relativně tradiční nespolehlivé vyprávění (unreliable narration) v ranějších románech a posunují se za hranice této techniky směrem k nepřirozenému vyprávění (non-natural narration) v pozdější tvorbě. Práce ukazuje, jak tento vývoj ovlivňuje vypodobnění vypravěčů a jejich psychiky, zejména jejich sebeklamu v souvislosti s vlastní identitou. Práce dále objasňuje, jakým způsobem se nespolehlivé a nepřirozené vyprávění pojí s různými způsoby zobrazení fikční reality a tudíž s různými typy fikčních světů. Základními cíli této disertace je tedy zaprvé vytyčení hranic mezi nespolehlivým vyprávěním a typem nepřirozeného vyprávění, v němž vypravěč v první osobě tvoří fikční svět (tento typ vypravěče nazývám world-creating non-natural narrator, světotvorný nepřirozený vypravěč), zadruhé analýza zvláštností nespolehlivého a nepřirozeného vyprávění ve vybraných románech, a zatřetí srovnání technik jednak zobrazení fikční reality, jednak charakteristiky vypravěče u Ishigura a Frische.

Abstract:

The thesis deals with the device of the unreliable narrator and a related, yet different technique of narration by a world-creating non-natural narrator, drawing a line between these two concepts and demonstrating this distinction in the comparative analysis of selected novels by Kazuo Ishiguro and Max Frisch. It details the two authors’ progress from a relatively traditional mode of unreliable narration towards the more experimental method of non-natural narration, together with the ways in which this shift influences the depiction of the psychology of narrating characters in their novels. In addition, the thesis links the different narrative strategies with various techniques of representing fictional reality and hence various types of fictional worlds. The thesis has three basic aims: to trace the borders between unreliable narration and narration by a world-creating non-natural narrator, to analyze the peculiarities of both unreliable and non-natural narration in the selected novels, and to compare Ishiguro’s and Frisch’s techniques of depicting fictional reality and of characterizing the narrator. In the theoretical chapter, titled “Establishing Fictional Facts,” I discuss the main approaches, developments and points of dissension in the sphere of unreliable narration, with focus on the following three approaches: the rhetorical position (Wayne Booth and James Phelan), the reader-oriented theory (mainly Ansgar Nünning) and the communicative model (Tamar Yacobi). Drawing on the existing approaches, I formulate the theory of unreliable narration that is used throughout the thesis: I consider a narrator unreliable when his/her account differs from an implicit version of the story that the reader identifies as fictional reality on the basis of information contained in the text. The narrator’s own discourse thus lets the reader infer things that the narrator is not aware of or is trying to hide from the narratee. Using possible-worlds theory as applied in literature (e.g. by Marie-Laure Ryan and Lubomír Doležel), I argue that in unreliable narration, the version of what happens as presented by the narrator corresponds to the narrator’s possible world that is at odds with the fictional reality (the textual actual world) of the work. By contrast, narration by what I call a world-creating non-natural narrator projects a fictional reality which is affected by the narrating character’s distorted perspective. The following chapter, titled “The Retold and Relived Identities of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Narrators,” comprises three subchapters concentrating on novels by the British author Kazuo Ishiguro: each presents a close reading of one novel, complemented by an analysis of the narrative strategies employed and their relation to narratorial unreliability and, when relevant, to non-natural narration. I demonstrate that while Ishiguro uses unreliable narration in his first three novels (An Artist of the Floating World, A Pale View of Hills and The Remains of the Day), he moves beyond the borders of narrative unreliability in his fourth novel (The Unconsoled), where the fictional reality adopts the slant of the narrating character. The narrator’s creative power over the fictional world, that is his ability to bend narrative facts, exceeds the limits of what homodiegetic narrators are capable of doing as given by their anthropomorphic status. Unreliable narration does not apply here, since the text does not offer any alternative version of the narrated story. Ishiguro’s fifth novel, When We Were Orphans, combines the narrative techniques used in the writer’s previous novels: the novel contains non-natural elements that can be integrated into the frame of narrative unreliability. After using Ishiguro’s novels to prove my theoretical argument concerning the distinction between unreliable and world-creating non-natural narrators, I move to providing further examples of the two narrative techniques in my analyses of

Abstract:

three novels by the Swiss German writer Max Frisch in the chapter named “The Invented Identities of Max Frisch’s Narrators and/in a Comparative Perspective.” Each analysis of a novel by Frisch is followed by a comparative section in which I point out similarities and differences between the particular novel examined and the novels by Ishiguro analysed in the previous chapter. Frisch’s Homo faber presents a fairly traditional self-deceived unreliable narrator. In Stiller, narrative unreliability, which is a kind of passive irony, is combined with the narrator’s active irony. In Mein Name sei Gantenbein, as I argue, no plane of fictional reality exists in the novel, because the narrated stories are not fictionally real, but possible. This speaks against using the unreliable narrator as an interpretive strategy, although the stories constituting the plot are the narrator's inventions. The analyses show that all the narrators deceive themselves about their self-concepts: they try to deflect their selves, either by telling or by living their self-narratives. Revisiting Ishiguro’s narrators in the context of Frisch’s novels has brought to light that the narrators’ revisions of self-narratives can be regarded as their inventions of a new self. Therefore, the theme of the invented nature of one’s identity, which is treated explicitly in Frisch’s works, can be spotted in Ishiguro’s fiction as well, albeit in a less direct manner. In some novels this idea is represented by realist means (unreliable narration), while in others a more experimental technique of metaphorical depiction is employed (non-natural narration). The former strategy exposes the narrators’ manipulation of facts in telling, whereas the latter method shows the narrators, as it were, living their made-up selves.

Keywords

unreliable narration, world-creating non-natural narrator, fictional worlds, possible worlds, fictional reality, Kazuo Ishiguro, Max Frisch, self-deception, self-concept, identity

Language used: English

Date on which the thesis was submitted / produced: 7. 12. 2009

Thesis defence

• Date of defence: 22. 1. 2010
• Supervisor: prof. Mgr. Milada Franková, CSc.
• Reader: Mgr. et Mgr. Kateřina Prajznerová, M.A., Prof. Dr. Monika Fludernik

Masaryk University

Faculty of Arts

Doctoral programme / field:
Philology (4-years) / Literature Comparatistics