Transtemporal and Transspatial Narrative in Philippe Claudel's <i>Monsieur Linh and his Child</i>

ÇAĞLAKPINAR B.

SELCUK UNIVERSITESI EDEBIYAT FAKULTESI DERGISI-SELCUK UNIVERSITY JOURNAL OF FACULTY OF LETTERS, cilt.43, ss.69-82, 2020 (ESCI, TRDizin)

Özet

The corpus of this work consists of the contemporary French novelist Philippe Claudel's book named Monsieur Linh and his child which focuses on the themes of migration, exile, trauma and friendship. In this book, the emigration of an old man who lost his entire family except his baby grandson, to a place where he does not even know its tongue and his experiences are discussed. The events that happen to Mr. Linh who hold on to life for his grandson are narrated by a third singular narrator. Focusing on the protagonist's life, the relationship between reality and fiction is examined through the pair that is "hidden" and "shown" in the novel. Concealing one of the key elements until the end of the novel, the unexpected end of the narrator paves the way for the reader to begin the process of reunderstanding the text. However, the story universe of the novel is composed of uncertain time and place markers and this allows the events to address a common consciousness without being reduced to a place or a time. The limited use of character names also supports this notion. Suspending the temporal and spatial framework indefinitely enables the narrative, which transforms into a trans-temporal and trans-spatial structure, to be considered as a novel that reflects the reality of a common memory, not a particular segment. In this study, in order to shed light on the narrative universe of Mr. Linh and his child and to reveal the fiction of the novel, it is aimed to discuss the work within the scope of narrative, reality effect perspectives and fiction theories. The objective of this article is to examine the narrator's unreliability, the realistic feature of fiction, and the anonymization of the temporal / spatial framework of the narrative. In the study which emphasizes the mentioned elements, "possible worlds" and "reality effect" are taken as the basis methods. Within the scope of a qualitative research, an interpretive study is created by following the analysis method of written documents.