Narrative instances, focalizers and narratives in the Damned Yard of Ivo Andrić: Narrative situations

• Main Author: Bečejski Mirjana M.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Institute of Serbian Culture Priština, Leposavić 2014-01-01
• Series: Baština
• Subjects: the damned yard; history; narrative situations; narrative levels; narrative instance; focalizer; narrative; meta-narration; ancient story
• Online Access: https://scindeks-clanci.ceon.rs/data/pdf/0353-9008/2014/0353-90081436063B.pdf

The Damned Yard of Ivo Andrić is the history of very complex structure, which represents the challenge even to the most contemporary theories of narration. The complexity of its narrative analysis is enlarged by permanent change and overlapping of narrative instances identity, focalizers, and narratives which condition the narrative situations succession. Five narrative levels and six the most important narrative instances can be singled out - external narrator (EN), and five narrators characters (NC): unnamed young man, Fr Peter, Haim, Zaim and Ćamil. There are approximately as many focalizers and narratives, but in many cases it is difficult or even impossible to determine the focalization subject; for example, with double or coupled focalization, which is very close to free indirect speech, and with argumentative parts of the text, which are neither narrative nor descriptive, but they contain reflections on the tragic position of man in the world, on the life and death, art and eternity and so on, in which the ideology of the text itself is the most frequently contained. The most important of such reflections are dedicated to story and storytelling, that is, to the most complex problems of the theory of storytelling - to different story-tellers (which may serve as the sketch for modern typology of narrative instances), problems of narrative (ideal listener and his near relative, ideal reader), poetics of the time and space (since the space is here part of the fable), etc. Analysis of narrative instances, focalizers and narratives, and change of narrative situations, and interlocking of narrative levels in the Damned Yard is shown as masterfully calculated writer's tool to draw the attention at meta-narrative level - to art or the narrative construction itself, from which we are reading that the authentic story is never being ended. 'It is everywhere as the life itself', as Roland Bart was narrating.