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Narrative Structure in Maupassant: Frames of Desire

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Angela S. Moger
Angela S. Moger*
Affiliation:
Sarah Lawrence CollegeBronxville, New York
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Abstract

This essay explores the dynamics of framed narrative through readings of two Maupassant stories that illustrate the range of potential in the frame. Scrutiny of “La rempailleuse” and “En voyage” reveals, in particular, how a frame modifies the effect of, and reaction to, the narrative it surrounds. The more general principle that emerges is that the seemingly gratuitous border consisting of the “extra” narrator and his addressees operates, paradoxically, against closure, casting the reader into a metacommunicative realm where a second sign system springs from the first. Thus, in “En voyage,” romantic love, the thematic content, serves as the basis for a poetics of narrative and illuminates the larger implications of the interminability of the paratactic structure. Issues addressed are the strategies latent in the frame and the way the form itself calls into question the very nature and function of narrative.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 100 , Issue 3 , May 1985 , pp. 315 - 327
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1985

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