Nespolehlivé vyprávění a nemožný fikční svět: Podobojí Daniely Hodrové
Unreliable Narration and an Impossible Fictional World: Daniela Hodrová’s Podobojí

Summary/Abstract: This article seeks to clarify aspects of unreliable narration, using the example of Daniela Hodrová’s novel Podobojí (In Both Kinds, 1991). The author recapitulates the shift in his own conception of the narrator, originally presented in ‘Typology of the Narrator: Point of View in Fiction’ (1967) and Narrative Modes in Czech Literature (1973), respectively. Rejecting the notion of personalized narrator, the author accepts Tomáš Kubíček (Vypravěč, 2007) conception of the narrator as ‘textual strategy’. The advantages of this conception most clearly appear in the analysis of modern and postmodern narratives which resist the anthropomorphization of the narrator. The unreliable narration appears in several forms, but its most palpable manifestation is the creation of logically impossible fictional worlds. The fictional world of Podobojí, which is probably the first fictional world of this kind discovered in Czech fiction, is logically impossible for it contains or implies logical contradictions. Most visible of them is the neutralization of the opposites ‘living’ and ‘dead’ in the fictional entity ‘the undead’. The logically impossible fictional world can be imagined, but cannot be textually authenticated, so the authoress of Podobojí employs various masking strategies, especially the devices of the mythological world creation. The construction of the logically impossible world is reinforced by the disintegration of narrative time, the fragmentation of texture and by the fusion of the narrator’s and the characters’ plans.

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