THE FICTIONAL SELF: A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF CONTEMPORARY NOVELS IN WHICH THE AUTHOR PARTICIPATES AS A FICTIONAL PERSONA (CZECH REPUBLIC, PERU, ARGENTINA)

This study is principally concerned with the authorial persona in third person narration: Ernesto Sabato's Abaddon el exterminador, Norman Mailer's The Armies of the Night, and John Barth's Letters. Also considered is a sampling of works in which the authorial persona is the principal first person narrator: Christopher Isherwood's Down There on a Visit, William Demby's The Catacombs, Mario Vargas Llosa's La t(')ia Julia y el escribidor, and Milan Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. Sabato uses his persona to investigate fiction from within by examining it from the same ontological level as that of his fictional characters and to illustrate his personal involvement in the fictions he creates. Mailer wishes to establish his persona as the kind of hero who will capture American hero fantasy so that he may make a statement of a higher transcendental truth arrived at by fictionally experiencing the March on the Pentagon. With his persona Barth searches for an authentic art form and for his authentic self among the previous fictional versions of himself. Isherwood's novel is not a vehicle of self-knowledge but a record of his search for identity until in Part Four he emerges as the prototype of a believable religious hero. Demby uses his persona to show how reality can be experienced on three planes: the historic, the everyday, and the fictional. Vargas Llosa contrasts his persona with the soap opera writer Camacho in order to show how the former developed into a writer by escaping crippling self-absorption and a stifling Peruvian society. Kundera uses his persona to explore his involvement in the Communist take over of Czechoslovakia while the other fictional characters expand the scope of the personal vision to make a statement about Western culture in general. By entering the world of fiction, all the personae test the relationship between art and life, challenge outmoded ideas about the barriers between fact and fiction, and affirm the value of the self and of the novel as an art form capable of expressing truth.