Browsing by Author "Hailemariam, Tadesse"

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    Analysis of Narrative voice in R. C. Binstock’s Tree of Heaven
    (Addis Ababa University, 2010-06) Hailemariam, Tadesse; Yazbec, Olga (PhD)
    Fictional narratives are composed of stories. The stories that are in the fictional narratives seek someone to tell them. As a result, there is an agent who is the creation of the author that tells the stories found in the narrative fiction. Readers while engaged in the act of reading a fictional narrative, they hear the speaking voice that tells them the stories. In order to know who specifically is telling the story, readers ask the voice question “who speaks?” The answer to the voice question becomes a narrator. A narrator is the author’s being that speaks out the words of a fictional narrative. The present study focuses on analyzing the narrative voices employed to narrate the story of a single narrative text, Tree of Heaven. In doing so, it analyses textual elements that signal the presence of the narrators in the fictional text. In addition, it analyzes the relationship between the narrators and the author, the relationship between the narrators and the story they narrate, the perceptibility of the narrators, the reliability of the narrators, the temporal relation of narration, and the narrative level to which the narrators belong. Based on the focus of the analysis, the study shows that the author has employed two narrators having distinct voices to narrate the events of the story. The narrators are distinct for they are male and female. As a result, in reading the novel, we hear the voice of two extra-homodiegetic narrators telling the story by taking turns in the chapters of the novel. The narrators are still autodiegetic for they are the heroes in the story they narrate. Both the narrators are named and sexually determinate. The narrators are easily identifiable and unreliable in the course of narrating the story. The narrators are known as extradiegetic narrators for they belong to the first-degree narrative, i.e., the matrix narrative. The analysis done also shows that the narrators are totally different from the author.