ABSTRACT
Chapter 5, ‘Discourse Deixis in Disnarration’, reviews previously studied types of disnarration to explore how far and in what ways discourse deixis contributes to their workings. As in the other two central chapters in this book, examples from John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse (1988 [1968]), Brigid Brophy’s In Transit: A Heroi-Cyclic Novel (2002 [1969]), Robert Coover’s Pricksongs and Descants (2011 [1969]), John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1996 [1969]), B. S. Johnson’s Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry (2001 [1973]), and Steve Katz’s The Exagggerations of Peter Prince (2017 [1968]) are investigated. In this chapter, these investigations analyse the role of discourse deixis in denarration, alternarration, negation and hypothetical focalisation, and narrative refusal and the antinarratable. These investigations illustrate how discourse deixis helps to distinguish different paths and segments of narrative during narrative acts of countering one path or segment with another, of shifting between them, or of temporarily or permanently cancelling them out. This chapter also illustrates the ways in which some kinds of alternarration, unlike the other types of disnarration, may gain some of their meaning precisely through a crucial absence of discourse deixis.
