Multiperspectivity in William Faulkner's as i lay dying and orhan pamuk's my name is red

Abstract EN

Multiperspectivity, sometimes also referred to as multiple narrators, is a narrative technique or mode of narration commonly employed in modern and postmodern novels.

This innovative literary phenomenon has been of high interest to ingenious writers of 20th and 21st centuries, due to its prodigious deviation in the narrative text.

The question of multiple narrators has created several controversies among literary critics as it distinguishes itself from traditional techniques of narration and other narratological concepts.

William Faulkner in As I Lay Dying (1930) and Orhan Pamuk in My Name is Red (1998) have employed multiple narrators for discrepant purposes and functions.

Both novels are similarly divided into fifty-nine chapters; As I Lay Dying involves fifteen narrators from the Bundren family as well as other villagers.

My Name is Red covers twenty-one voices ranging from human to the dead and inanimate objects.

The two novels coincidentally share several landscapes regarding the narrative technique and overall structure along with some disparate features, which are analytically discussed in the present paper.

This paper attempts to spot the purposes and implications of Faulkner and Pamuk in employing multiple narrators in their novels, As I Lay Dying and My Name is Red, successively, by analyzing multiperspectivity as a narrative technique and its potential effects on the structure of the story as well as on the reader.

This is expected to be accomplished through a comparative analysis of both novels by providing adequate evidence and examples from the texts, and by developing a critical argument based on a theoretical framework of some model scholars in the related field, such as Vera Nünning and Ansgar Nünning (2000), Marcus Hartner (2008), which will be a comparative basis for the current study.

In conclusion, this article, by closely examining the aforementioned novels, sheds a new light on the rarely acknowledged issue of multiperspectivity.