NARRATIVE STRUCTURE OF THE TEXTUAL WORLD IN A CONTEMPORARY ENGLISH POLYPHONIC NOVEL (BASED ON THE NOVEL “EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED” BY JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER)

Abstract

The article focuses on the peculiarities of the narrative structure of a textual world in a contemporary polyphonic novel. The study is based on the main principles of M. Bakhtin’s theory wherein “polyphony” is defined as a plurality of independent voices and consciousnesses and is viewed as a marker of a literary text dialogical character. The research is performed on the material of the novel “Everything is Illuminated” by Jonathan Safran Foer that is a typical example of a contemporary postmodern novel-chronicle comprising several heterogeneous texts written from the standpoint of different narrators. The conducted research made it possible to trace different subjects of narration (narrators) with their corresponding textual worlds actualized in different temporal planes of the text. The speech of each narrator creates its own textual world interrupted by the inserts from others characters’ worlds, which results in a kind of structural dialogue between the two plot lines – contemporary and retrospective. Each plot line forms a conglomerate macroworld uniting microworlds of the characters. The given text structure secures the polyphony between the main plot lines as well as within them, i.e. between the voices of the narrators and personages making up each macroworld. This multilayered narrative perspective combined with the blurred time and place planes becomes a means of drawing attention to the main problems of the novel and revealing its message – the idea of “illumination” that can be viewed as a sustained metaphor realized via the dialogical intersection of the plot lines, narrative planes and points of view on the depicted events. Together with the author communicating with multiple voices in the text the reader becomes a participant of the textual dialogue and as such he follows the discussion, compares different points of view and forms his own attitude and vision of the textual situation. In this way textual polyphony stimulates a particular type of text reading and interpretation constructing the image of the intellectual reader-researcher that takes an active part in a polyphonic dialogue.