REPRESENTATION OF THE MAIN CHARACTER LIFE IN THE OLGA TOKARCZUK’S STORY "OPEN YOUR EYES, YOU ARE ALREADY DEAD"

Abstract

Olga Tokarczuk is one of the most critically acclaimed and successful writers in Poland; in 2019, she was awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature as the first Polish female prose writer. The research paper analyzes Olga Tokarczuk’s story “Open your eyes, you are already dead”, one from 19 stories of “Playing on Many Drums” collection. The current study aims to fill a gap in existing scientific literature regarding Olga Tokarczuk’s flash fiction. We have researched the peculiarities of the Polish author’s artistic modeling of the main character’s life in the story “Open your eyes, you are already dead”. The significance of this paper lies in the fact that researching the authors’ writing manner will help to understand her creative idea and its verbal realization in the form of a literary work. We have used a complex approach by using elements of biographical, genealogical, typological, hermeneutic, comparative and structural-semiotic methods of literary analysis. As a result of the research, it was determined that the latest world literature, in particular Polish, is permanently focused on modeling the life of a modern person. Olga Tokarczuk’s story “Open your eyes, you’re already dead” represents the life story of an average person with her subjective experience, the author is looking for the motives, causes and consequences of the psychological state in which she lives. They have made her a person with an unbalanced soul, she hasn’t any value orientations and skills of civilized communication with the world, the main character is unable to adequately assess herself and her immediate environment. The splitting of the character’s consciousness, her permanent escapism is the background on which the Polish author builds the story. Confusion, the inability to overcome the gap between reality and the fictional text of the detective novel that S. reads, between fictional and actually real, deprives the main character of joy and a sense of happiness, fullness of life, her real world is devoid of brightness and immersed in mundanity, and artistic reality in the analyzed story does not depend on real reality. The reality is presented through the prism of its heroine’s perception Olga Tokarczuk’s story “Open your eyes, you’re already dead”. Thus, we observe the dominance of the subjective picture of the world.