Vicarious voices and positioning in marking counter-narratives in fiction

Abstract

This article studies the role of dialogues, oppositional positioning and small stories in telling counter-narratives in fiction. The countering itself is understood as intentional action and as a communicative strategy, which raises the question about how this resistance is expressed or signalled. To answer these questions, Julian Barnes’s Elizabeth Finch and Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Committed are studied from the perspective of counter-narration, including the role of embedded dialogues and oppositional narrative positioning in marking counter-narratives. This approach, drawing on small stories research, foregrounds the counter-narratives’ capacity to resort to factuality within fiction, which addresses the narrative contests of social world in a different way than purely fictional discourse. The narratological study of counter-narratives encourages thus the integration of small stories research and positioning analyses more closely into the analytic repertoire of narratology.