Metafora e përmbysur
The Overturned Metaphor

Summary/Abstract: The novel “A Song of Truth and Semblance” written by Dutch novelist Cees Noteboom, is published at the time when the debate regarding postmodernism was at its peak and was carving the poetics which nowadays are known as poetics of postmodernism. Therefore, having in mind these facts, it is clearly understandable that Noteboom through this novel affirms the criteria of postmodern writing. As a starting point Noteboom does it by the narration which he uses. “A Song of Truth and Semblance”can be enlisted in line with those novels which are built as a story within a story, due to the fact that the situation is placed within a situation (we are talking about the situation of characters) at the time when the narrator and the narrative distance remain the same. The special element of this novel is the way of using the narrative focus. In this novel narrates the omniscient narrator and introduces two pair of characters who produce two levels of situations, and all of these are narrated by the same narrative distance. In the first situation is given the life of a Writer (character), his conversations with the Other Writer (also character), his preoccupations with writing, all of them situated in the 1979, whereas in the second situation is given the story about Colonel and the Doctor (both characters of the character), which is situated in the year of 1878-79. So, there is no use of prolepseor analepse but it is the way of narrative focus through which the narrator articulates his round trip from Writer situations to his character situations (both characters) and vice-versa, and creates the duality of fabular time which is perfectly used by the author in order to build a model narrative structure. By doing so the Writer’s character is articulated in his conversations with the Other Writer, while his situation as an author is given by describing the relations between the Colonel and the Doctor as his characters. Finally, we can freely say that the novel “A Song of Truth and Semblance” is written by transforming some philosophical issues into diegetic devices, and this is what makes this little novel one of the biggest in world literature.

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