Beyond literature? Dead narrators in contemporary literature

Abstract

Obviously, the death of the narrator does not allow him any more to tell his own story, according to Vladimir Nabokov’s dictum “The ‘I’ of the book cannot die in the book”. However, there are many novels and short stories in contemporary German literature with a dead narrator. They belong to the so-called Hereafter narratives (“Jenseitserzählungen”). My essay argues that the death of the narrator is the resurrection of the unreliable narrator in a very special sense: with a magic realism in Daniel Kehlmann’s Der fernste Ort (2001), and in Patrick Roth’s Johnny Shines oder Die Wiedererweckung der Toten (1993) by mythopoetic writing.