| Summary: | Raymond Queneau’s Zazie dans le métro (1959) can be considered a behaviourist novel. Characters are barely outlined and look like puppets who spend their lives in a frantic rhapsody. However, the construction of the dialogic exchanges among characters is very refined ; this seems mostly aimed at a realistic effect, giving priority to the expressiveness of oral language. We have the impression that sometimes the primary narrator’s discourse is tainted by the characters’ speech ; the narrator does not only seem to describe events as they happen, but he also participates empathically in the narrative. At times, he seems to experience the same irrepressible urge for verbal communication of his characters. This paper explores the results of the encounter between the narrator and the characters’ discourses, particularly the stylistic devices creating an effect of increased realism. From time to time, this contamination generates an effect of ambiguity in the enunciative reference. Queneau was undoubtedly aware of this ambiguity, given his inclination to the structured shapes of literature, the so-called ‘framework’, which is an essential condition of his art making.
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