Blending and narrative viewpoint: Jonathan Raban’s travels through mental spaces

Abstract

This article1applies the framework of conceptual integration (or blending) theory (as developed by Fauconnier and Turner) to the analysis of several travel narratives by Jonathan Raban. The primary goal of the article is to show how the analysis of blending strategies used in the text may help in the recognition of the specific features of a writer’s narrative style. An extensive discussion of a variety of blends appearing in Raban’s texts also serves as a background to the discussion of the relation between choices of blending strategies and the allocation of narrative viewpoint. It is argued that the concept of narrative viewpoint crucially relies on the structure of blending networks. Finally, it is shown how interpretation of viewpoint phenomena in the narrative builds on the mechanism termed viewpoint compression.