Magic Realism

Magic Realism is about authors using utter disillusionment to portray such an intense feeling that cannot be described in the realm of pure reality. The article starts with an excerpt from the novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting which exemplifies the idea of magic realism and is a great opener for the discussion of such a literary use. The excerpt is about the communist party in the Czech Republic and uses magic realism to help describe the author's total abandonment from the party and complete loneliness they felt in response to such an act. The author of the article gives a brief cultural overview of where magic realism began and in which cultures and languages it is more commonly found. Famous authors that frequent the use of magic realism are Salman Rushdie, Milan Kundera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Guenter Grass. The author also cites several examples from modern fiction that bring up different experiences all through the same technique of writing. The reader is then given more of a personal background that brings us back to the excerpt from the beginning of the article. We understand more clearly what the excerpt is about after a more political and personal background is given. The author eloquently helps the reader understand what the excerpt from The Book of Laughter and Forgetting means and how it makes us feel. "...it so powerdully and poignantly expresses the emotion that has been built up over the preceding pages." The article ends with the author analysing the writing style and how the author's cinematic background may have influenced his writing style.

The Unreliable Narrator

The Unreliable Narrator was mainly about how authors develop the essential characters that narrate their novels. It starts of with a brief excerpt from The Remains of the Day and the rest of the article revolves around the the character Stevens and the unreliablity of what he dictates as fact. At first the author of the article defines what an unreliable narrator is as, "invented characters who are part of the stories they tell" and that the point of using an unreliable narrator is, "to reveal in an interesting way the gap between appearance and reality." The author then gives the readers a bit more background to the novel to help understand the character flaws of the particular 'unreliable narrator' that he focuses on: Stevens. Many of the paragraphs focus on incidences where Stevens reports himself in a more favourable light than an observable source may think. The author explains Stevens' emotional flaws or 'emotional sterility' and his utter denial when he acts in a crass manner. The author then follows up his claims with another excerpt from the novel which again shows Stevens' distortion of reality. Finally, the author connects The Remains of the Day with another self-deluded narrator from the novel Pale Fire.