Narrative Embedding in The Postmodern American Novel with Reference to Stephen King’s Desperation

Abstract

The inclusion of a story within another story is a device which implies that there is an embedding of at least an additional narrative subordinated to the one that seems to frame it. This invariably signifies the shift back and forth of enunciative levels and/or text-world dimensions. Stephen King’s Desperation (1996) is the American postmodern novel which embodies the multiple framing of the fictional discourse by including some stretches and story-telling accounts based on chronicles, reproduced in chapter three, part III of the said novel. The embedded narrative is also given an autonomous subtitle “The American West: Legendary Shadows”, dealing with how the Chinese mine workers were treated in 1858-1859, while the novel discourse narrates events that took place in the second half of the twentieth century. The paper provides a sample analysis of the embeddings to reveal the intricate connection between the text-world polarities, its multiverse interaction, and the narrator’s/narrators’ presentational modes. Stephen King, as the inventor of the narrative levels, works out a complex set of diegesis vs. mimesis, as well as management of reporting distance in the representation of polyphony, voice, and voice-related issues in the embeddings. Despite the complexity and idiosyncracies of the structure, Desperation manages to attract the reader’s attention to the end, owing to the symbiotic relations between the frame and the embedding; and, moreover, owing to the interchangeable positions of these two in the course of the events, as will be proved in the paper.