Unspoken and Unseen. Male Characters in Literature from the Perspective of Personal Narrator in Julian Barnes’s Novel

Abstract

According to the theories of Wolf Schmid, Wolfgang Iser and Roman Ingarden, the presented paper follows the ways in which the reader is forced to reveal the logic of the story's selectivity in the reception process. Interest is mainly placed on different narrative gaps, the so-called places of indeterminacy, which trigger literary communication. Various theories of narrative gaps and text negations are demonstrated in Julian Barnes’s novel The Sense of an Ending (2011) depicting the story of four young men – old high-school friends – who have to deal with the death of their close one. The author chooses an interesting form of story composition and represents the literary text as a fraction which the reader concretizes and defines. This way the reader is able to decipher even those event components that are not explicitly present in the text and they call for different acts of reception.