MANUEL MUÑOZ’S EXPERIMENTAL NARRATIVE TECHNIQUES IN “EVERYTHING THE WHITE BOY TOLD YOU”
MANUEL MUÑOZ’S EXPERIMENTAL NARRATIVE TECHNIQUES IN “EVERYTHING THE WHITE BOY TOLD YOU”

Summary/Abstract: At the intersection of many identities, postcolonial writers, as is the case of Chicano/as, have had to push the boundaries of traditional narrative techniques in order to portray new, unique situations and experiences. Manuel Muñoz experiments with narrator, perspective and voice in his 2003 short story collection Zigzagger. In the story “Everything the White Boy Told You”, he builds a chimera collective narrator, which weaves multiple narrative levels by switching between 1st, 2nd and 3rd voices, between being heterodiegetic and homodiegetic, and ends up incorporating the main character in its collective ego. This allows Muñoz to build individual characters which are at the same time collective and archetypal, while distributing the responsibility of representation from the subject to its communities. The narrative techniques ensure immersion and cognitive involvement which leads to empathy and understanding, or at the very least to the questioning of the reader’s intersubjectivity.

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