Kazuo Ishiguro and Max Frisch: Bending Facts in Unreliable and Unnatural Narration

This book examines unreliable narration in novels by Kazuo Ishiguro and Max Frisch. It offers new perspectives on the two authors' uvre and on narrative unreliability as a narratological concept. It demarcates unreliable narration from related phenomena, such as unnatural narration, and points out similarities in Ishiguro's and Frisch's work.

Since the late 1990s unreliable narration has garnered popularity in narrative theory and has sparked a lively debate among scholars. This book traces the theoretical discussions surrounding narrative unreliability and examines the relationship of unreliable narration to antimimetic techniques of portraying self-deception. Standing on the border between classical and postclassical narratology, the study analyses Kazuo Ishiguro's and Max Frisch's innovative narrative strategies, offering new perspectives on their uvre and on unreliable narration as a narratological concept. A comparison of the methods Ishiguro and Frisch employ to explore the psychology of their narrators reveals a fascinating parallel in their development as novelists.

Autorentext

Zuzana Fonioková is Assistant Professor of Literature and Intercultural Communication at the Department of Czech Literature, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic. Her research interests include narratology and contemporary fiction.

Zusammenfassung
«The project carried out through the book deserves credit on several accounts.»
(Stefan Iversen, Journal of Literary Theory JLT - online 2017)

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Inhalt
Contents: Unreliable narration Unreliability Narratology Unnatural narration Kazuo Ishiguro Max Frisch Narrative strategies Narrator Literary theory 20th-century English literature 20th-century German literature Identity Memory Self-deception Fictional world Possible-world theory Postmodernism.