Fantastic hesitation, phenomena and the male character in Marie NDiaye’s Three Strong Women

The aim of this article is to demonstrate that the male protagonist of the second story of Marie NDiaye’s Three Strong Women (Trois femmes puissantes) can be viewed as a fantastic character. The protagonist’s hesitation in the face of unsettling phenomena – both the external world and the traumatic...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Romanica Cracoviensia 2020-01, Vol.20 (4), p.207-216
Main Author: Swoboda, Anna
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
19th century
Folklore
French literature
Genre
Literary characters
Literary criticism
Ndiaye, Marie (1967- )
Novels
Writers
Writing
Citations: Items that this one cites
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:The aim of this article is to demonstrate that the male protagonist of the second story of Marie NDiaye’s Three Strong Women (Trois femmes puissantes) can be viewed as a fantastic character. The protagonist’s hesitation in the face of unsettling phenomena – both the external world and the traumatic events from his past – constitutes the central pivot of his construction. The fantastic characteristics of Rudy Descas, whose voice is predominant in the text, reveal the multidimensionality of the supernatural in NDiaye’s work, as the boundaries between the notion of the “character” and the “phenomenon” are not clearly defined. The analysis is based on literary theories concerning the nineteenth century fantastic, the new fantastic and the African fantastic.
ISSN:1732-8705
2084-3917
DOI:10.4467/20843917RC.20.020.13306