MILAN KUNDERA'S CONCEPT OF NOVEL'S NARRATIVE STRUCTURE

Abstract

Essays are a unique part of Milan Kundera's literary legacy. These creations showed that creating novels is not only an emotional activity but also a very rational one. Through his essays, Kundera expressed his concept of many aspects of novel art. In particular, the novel's narrative structure was one of several points he discussed throughout his essays. This paper places Milan Kundera's views in the movement of narratological theory in general, using biographical method and comparative manipulation. Kundera imaged that the novel’s narrative structure is arranged into four layers: the raw materials layer, the creating layer, the text layer, and the meaning after reception layer. He also proposed specific artistic methods to construct the novel's narrative structure: the “polyphonic” composition – the other “polyphonic” besides celebrated Mikhail Bakhtin's polyphonic theory - was Kundera’s distinctive creation. His concept of stratification of novels’ narrative structure appeared as a modern thought about novels, parallel with post-classical narratology. The research results contribute to systematizing and clarifying the uniqueness of the writer's artistic thought from the perspective of narratology, and simultaneously, provide a novel narrative model that can be applied to analyze many modern and postmodern novels.