"Demian - Emile Sinclair Anxious Teenager '' Style

The novel Demian: The Story of Emil Sinclair’s Youth (refer to Demian later), writtenby Hermann Hesse using first person narrative, focuses on the hardship of youngSinclair finding himself. It is Hesse’s first narrative novel after his second life change.Starting from this novel, Hesse began to emphasize the inner world of the charactershe created.This article uses the frame of Gérard Genette’s narratology to analyze Demian fromtime, mood, and voice. Genette defines the three connotations that “narrative”conveys,(i.e.: story–real or fictional content, narrative–the texts or discourse usedin the story, and narration–the act of narrating that forms the texts or discourse) thenuses time, mood and voice to analyze the relationships among the three connotations.From time’s perspective, the narrator uses analepsis, proplesis to disorganize thetimeline of Demian. The frequent use of combination of ellipsis and summary makesthe novel lack of constancy as well, so that the narrative of external world is relegatedto the subordinate position. From mood’s perspective, narrator stresses on dialogueand the inner world of the characters by using interior monologue, transposed speech,and reported speech. And by obscuring the discourse-boundaries between characterand narrator, the unification of the narrator and the main character would be achievedat the end, which on the other side reflects the development of Sinclair. From voice’sperspective, the narrator used first person analepsis to review his boyhood. In this waythe self-examination and analysis from his view would be easier. Moreover, thenarrator stresses on the extradiegetic level of the story, continuously appears in thestory by the way of using narrator discourse and defines his audients as “people whounderstand the nature of human”. This on one side bestows a reasonable existing onthose extraordinary events and increases the credibility of the narration. On the otherside, it shows that the narration is not decided by the objective view of the externalworld. The key of this novel is not portraying of the events and characters, but thedetailed depiction of Sinclair’s inner world. For narrator, the authentic world is the inner world of human kind, while the external world, as the carrier, mirrors the innerworld. That’s the reason why the narrator concentrates on the narrative of inner worldand there is no dominant plot with detailed description in this novel.From the analysis of time, mood, and voice, one could see the interaction andunifying relationship among story, narrative and narration. The analysis alsohighlights the special narrative features of Hesse’s “soul autobiography”: the essenceof narrative is not the a story with a quirky twist, but to reflect the relationshipbetween authentic world and true self by means of monologue narrative.