”¿Es que crees que estoy loco?” La narración de la conciencia en tres novelas de Ramón Hernández

Abstract

This dissertation aims to explore how one character’s alleged madness can be called into question. Ramón Hernández’s novels often create an ambiguity about events that befall the main character: have they imagined the plot or did it really happen in the novel’s world? Using three novels by Hernández, this thesis makes the assertion that it is the reader himself who has the last word. On the one hand, the stories show a character that is perceived as mad by her surroundings, but on the other hand, there are textual signals that allow an opposing view. Based on both classical and cognitive narratology, this study examines how the text constructs this ambiguity, and how, through different strategies, the text invites the reader to attribute a consciousness to the characters. The textual analysis shows how the novels encourage a reading in which the reader is asked to adopt the characters’ positions and to feel as they do. This will affect the reader's perception of the assumed madness of the character, which henceforth becomes problematic. Some features that can elicit contradictory responses in relation to the character’s consciousness are homonymy of narrators, which can create confusion as to who (both which narrator; and narrator or character) is speaking; unreliability, where the credibility of first-person narrators can create doubts about events within the narrative the prolific use of the historical present, where the ‘nows’ and ‘thens’ become temporally equalized; or the polysemy of perception verbs, where ‘see’ can also mean ‘remember’, ‘imagine’, ‘hallucinate’. The results of the study suggest that the doubt triggered by the texts can be explained by a narrative clash between two forces. Namely, the novels’ focus on the narration of a character’s experience in the way he/she perceives it, which create closeness between reader and character, and the use of strategies that threaten that closeness.