The Silenced Narrator and the Notion of “Proto-Narrative”

Abstract

Narrative voices in Ismet Prcić’s memoir/novel “Shards” are many; this article primarily focuses on what we refer to as the voice of the “silenced narrator” that appears to speak from a deep (“s ubdiegetic”) narrative level shaped by the unconscious workings of traumatic experience. Starting from psychological insights into traumatic states (Elbert and Schauer, Hunt, Crossley, etc.) and tracing the encoded symptoms of this illness across the text, the discussion moves on to a theoretical level to investigate notions proposed by authors such as Genette (to discuss narrative levels), Ricœur (in examining the construction of self), Caruth (in evaluating narrative implications of the literary voicing of trauma), Antonio Damasio (in exploring the source and the nature of the trauma-related destruction of the narratively voiced “I”), and others. These are used to establish the concept of a narrative subject whose voice emerges from the deep zone of their “proto-self” (Damasio), to be weaved into a distinctive narrative form that we will refer to as “proto-narrative.”