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Italo calvino art5/20/2023 But what if the voice keeps changing, easily passing from a didactic omniscience to self-obsessed fussiness and then again to philosophical detachment, only to end up in the drawl of profound boredom? What if the narrator refuses to use words to communicate and invents pictures which are then described and understood as the true story, hidden within the husk of language which conceals the image? The paper analyzes some of the issues of unreliability in connection with the use of visual stimuli in Vladimir Nabokov’s Despair and Italo Calvino’s The Nonexistent Knight.ĭuring his career as a writer, Calvino achieved a special bond with the children’s universe. In this puzzling task, the reader should be aided by the subtleties of the narrator’s tone: a mocking, self-congratulatory intonation suggests a peculiar kind of deviousness a naïve, childish voice – a certain kind of innocence unstable, delusional tone indicates possible mental problems and methodical mythmaking betrays personality issues requiring a more focused observation. Yet, to solve the problem of whether the narrator is reliable, one needs to understand his motives for (not) telling the truth, which significantly delays the process and introduces further problems of interpretation. Unreliability of the narrator is quite often the issue one has to settle to be able to assess the invented world.
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