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Narrative Gapping in P. Auster’s Novel “4321”: Towards the Problem of “Nonnarrated” in Contemporary Narratives
Narrative gapping is one of the debated issues in contemporary narratology. This is evidenced by the recent work
(2023) of G. Prince and W. Schmid: the first author complements his own classification of gaps already including “disnarrated” and
“alternarrated” types with new types of narration – “undernarrated” and “overnarrated” ones. The second scholar suggests focusing
on the “nonnarrated” – that which is not presented in the narrative, but is relevant to the story being told. The study of narrative
gaps is especially urgent in relation to the modern forms of narration which have not received due scholarly attention yet. Among
them is a forking-path narrative presented in the novel “4321” by P. Auster (2017). This narrative can be regarded as an example of
“overnarration” (in the terminology of Prince): it tells the reader not about one life of the character, but about four lives at once.
Each new “life” of the character in the novel is a separate storyline that comes into conflict (from the point of view of unfolding
events) with other “lives” (in one life the character dies, in another he is still alive, etc.). At the same time, at the level of the reader’s
perception, such “autonomy” of each storyline is not preserved: interacting with all of them, the reader inevitably correlates these
lines with each other, and the events presented in them inevitably (in his imagination) overlap one another. How do narrative gaps
function in this kind of narration? And what effect do they produce? The more storylines narrative produces, the wider the gaps
zone expands: thus, the reader’s growing knowledge about the character is followed by an increasing, limiting their abilities “igno-
rance”. Moreover, as long as each line, in spite of being “autonomous”, still tells the reader about one and the same character, the
appearance of new events in each subsequent line inevitably has the effect of filling gaps in the previous line. Narrative gapping on
the level of the plot and on the level of the reader’s perception in such a narrative differs: on the level of the plot, the gaps remain
“permanent” (in Schmid’s terminology), and on the level of the reader’s perception – “temporary”. The novel of Auster, as an exam-
ple of a forking-path narrative, only metareflexively intensifies this narrative specificity: several chapters conclude with the narra-
tor’s indication of gaps that will not be filled in the oncoming chapters of this storyline. Thanks to these cues, the reader’s attention
focuses on these gaps, and their “temporary” nature becomes ever more salient while correlating various storylines.