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Narrative Structure and the Search for the Self in Brigitte Reimann’s Franziska Linkerhand
Author(s) -
Jones Helen L.
Publication year - 1998
Publication title -
german life and letters
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.1
H-Index - 12
eISSN - 1468-0483
pISSN - 0016-8777
DOI - 10.1111/1468-0483.00105
Subject(s) - narrative , impossibility , poetics , plot (graphics) , perspective (graphical) , representation (politics) , reflexivity , literature , realism , perception , art , philosophy , aesthetics , epistemology , sociology , poetry , politics , visual arts , anthropology , law , statistics , mathematics , political science
Central to the paper is a detailed analysis of the formal structure of Franziska Linkerhand , with the focus placed predominantly on the roles of voices in the novel: from whose perspective are events in the novel narrated? Who is given the authority to speak in the text? And who corrects whose voices? By creating narrative layers in the first and the third person the author has produced a differentiated account of GDR reality and in doing so questions the dictates of socialist realism which demanded a ‘typical’ plot narrated with authorial distance from exemplary characters. Christa Wolf’s poetics of subjective authenticity, and changes in the perception of the reader in the GDR, have clearly influenced the writing of the novel. Furthermore, self‐reflexive elements of the text are shown to expose the impossibility of a personal history being anything other than constructed, although the belief that literature can mirror life is not rejected. Protest gegen die Fabel, die Romankonstruktion, die mir zu kristallen, zu rein erscheint, zu künstlich, zu klar.