WHO IS THE AUTHOR? (NARRATIVE STRATEGY IN THE NOVEL BY JIRI KRATOCHVIL A BEAR'S NOVEL)

The aim of this essay, which deals with the novel Medvedi roman (The Bear Novel) by Jiri Kratochvil, is to describe and analyze the way unreliable narration works. The narrative structure of the given text is constructed according to a "terrace-like hierarchy" that generates several mutual related narrative levels. In other words, what we face here is a multiple meta-narration. The unreliability of the text follows from narrator's features that are traditionally attributed to him, i.e. especially his ability to give us relevant information about the world he exists in. The narrator's strongly subjective modal attitude towards the fictional world results in the way we interpret him and accordingly in the fact that we call him unreliable. Besides its commonly detectable features unreliability is also based on the above mentioned macro-compositional technique, that is, a. meta-narration. In that case the category of unreliability is derived from the narrator's ontological status that at none of the narrative levels appears to be ontologically definitive. On the contrary, the mechanism has the ability to generate other and higher levels of narrators.