USE OF MULTIPLE NARRATORS IN MILAN KUNDERA’S NOVEL “THE JOKE
THE USE OF MULTIPLE NARRATORS IN MILAN KUNDERA’S NOVEL “THE JOKE”
With regards to narrative technique, novelists have proved themselves to be a conservative bunch: several fairly "standard" forms of narration exist, and authors tend to stick to them. Of course, these options are apparently fairly varied, ranging from hindsight to omniscience; and passing through dozens of other permutations... What more could we, the reader, possibly want? What more could the writer possibly offer? Such traditional techniques all have the same basic structure: we watch the whole story unfold through one set of eyes, as if we were seeing it happen, or maybe recalling events as we saw them. In the real world, however, we rarely witness entire sequences of events ourselves: we are often told about what happened, and from what other people tell us we then weave together a coherent whole. Sometimes the bits don’t even fit together properly. We have learnt to interpret information presented to us, we enjoy noting the discrepancies and accounting for them. Yet this is all too often precluded by the very structure of the novel: we have to sit back and relax. We are, in a sense, on rails.
Thus it comes as no surprise that Milan Kundera, an author renown for his interest in the Novel as an art from, has proposed his own personal solution to this "problem" of inflexible narrative form: multiple narrators. His first -and maybe most famous- novel, The Joke, has indeed a total of four story-tellers, each describing events from "their" point of view, as their lives intertwine and then diverge. The stories both complement and contradict each other, it is up to us to extrapolate the "truth" that lies somewhere in-between. Each reader, I suspect, will come away with a subtly different rendering of the story; their own personalised version.
The Joke starts in a deceptively simple manner, although maybe somewhat vague. We are immediately "incorporated" into Ludvik Jahn: we see through his eyes, we read his thoughts. There is nothing apparently unusual in the narrative technique of Part 1; it is a perfectly normal first-person narration. Only at the beginning of Part 2, when we are suddenly confronted by a new narrator, the rambling Helena Zemanek, do we notice the unusual structure of the novel. This first "narrator switch" also alerts us to the necessity of having some way of distinguishing between the various story-tellers:...