ABSTRACT

Well, I’ve always been a word’s man myself. I would be, wouldn’t I? It’s always been words that have most affected me,’ conveys Graham Hendrick in Before She Met Me (1982). Considering Bakhtin’s concept of dialogism, this paper examines, comparatively, the relation between a constitutive, discursive framing of reality and a self-reflexive perception of being in time which reflects the life of the obscure, observable in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and Barnes’s Before She Met Me. Following the notion of a conflict between the outer narrative level, producing ‘discourse’ and the inner narrative level, vocalizing hesitation and discursive struggle, both novels provide a critical approach to taken-for-granted knowledge, destabilizing the characters’ conviction that mental states do possess a set of fixed and authentic patterns of meaning. As the narratives unfold, the predominantly external dimension of their characters thoughts and considerations gives path to new combinations of discourse which reveal the presence of the ‘grotesque’, unable to separate fact from fiction, or past from present.

摘要

嗯，我自己一直都是一个言出必行的人。我会的，不是吗？格雷厄姆·亨德里克（Graham Hendrick）在《她遇见我之前》（Before She Met Met Met ，1982）中说道：“对我影响最大的始终是话语。 ” 考虑到巴赫金的对话主义概念，本文比较地考察了现实的构成性、话语框架与时间存在的自我反省性感知之间的关系，这种时间反映了陀思妥耶夫斯基的《罪与罚》和巴恩斯的《在她之前》中模糊的、可观察的生活。见过我。这两部小说都遵循外在叙事层面（产生“话语”）和内在叙事层面（发出犹豫和话语斗争）之间的冲突概念，为理所当然的知识提供了批判性的方法，动摇了人物的心理状态信念。确实拥有一套固定且真实的意义模式。随着叙事的展开，人物思想和考虑的主要外部维度为新的话语组合提供了道路，揭示了“怪诞”的存在，无法将事实与虚构、过去与现在分开。