| Since Wayne Booth's pioneering work, The Rhetoric of Fiction, much progress has been made in the field of narratology. The application of narratological paradigms by literary critics has yielded an improved understanding of individual works and of literature in general. Although critics of Don Quijote have tended to eschew advances in literary theory, scholars, such as James Parr and Jose Manuel Martin Moran, have recently begun to incorporate the concepts and terminology of narratology into their studies with promising, if inconsistent, results. The research of Parr is especially important, because he has shown conclusively that Cide Hamete Benengeli is not the extradiegetic narrator of the Quijote. However, Parr does follow critical tradition in that he identifies several "voices" within the text as narrators of the Quijote. Although Martin Moran's recent study offers the most detailed application of narratological theory to Cervantes's text, the manner in which he applies Genette's "functions of the narrator" in his analysis leads him to the dubious conclusion that Cide Hamete Benengeli shares the functions of extradiegetic narration with the segundo autor. In the dissertation, I engage the work of Parr, Martin Moran, and selected critics of the diegetic structure of Don Quijote, and I propose a "univocal" reading, in which there exists only one extradiegetic narrator of Don Quijote: the segundo autor. |
