Pakhsarian Natalia Tigranovna – DSc in Philology, Professor, Leading Researcher, Department of Literary Studies, Institute of Scientific Information for Social Sciences of the Russian Academy of Sciences, ORCID: 0000-0002-1292-9883
The article examines some features of narrative identity (P. Ricoeur) in the work of the modern French writer Michel Houellebecq. The desire to mix truth and fiction about his own biography is combined in his interview with the desire to bizarrely connect the autobiographical and the fictional in each of his novels. The novel Map and Territory is especially interesting for its ambiguous narrative game, since the writer Michel Houellebecq acts as one of the characters in it, who dies in the course of the action. At the same time, the main character of the novel, artist and photographer Jed Martin, is also a kind of alter ego of the author. Doubling the characters of the doppelgangers in this novel, Houellebecq plays with a narrative identity between and outside these characters, enhancing “multi-interpretability” (S. Van Wesemel) of his work and immersing the reader in a state of receptive uncertainty characteristic of postmodernism.
narrative identity; autofictionality; play; postmodernism; spatialization; Houellebecq.
Download textFor citing: Pakhsarian N.T. A writer in search of a narrative identity: Michel Houellebecq. Humanitarian aspects. Moscow: INION RAN. Vol. 3(59). Р. 85-97. DOI: 10.31249/chel/2024.03.06