ABSTRACT
This chapter is about Murakami's short story in which the narrator is unable to sleep due to a severe case of dissociation disorder. As a first-person narrator, in relating her story, she attempts to remain honest and share her negative emotions while forcing a positive perspective. Due to this, as the story unfolds, her narration becomes more and more unreliable, distorted, and inconsistent. In “Sleep,” the content of the story allows us to associate disnarration with the phenomenon of mind-wandering, which is a capacity of the mind that I assume to be the origin of the literary tool of disnarration. The effect the story may have on the reader is due to the formal elements as well as the peculiar representation of emotions. It is argued that the representation of emotions is what provides the narrativity of the story, which otherwise consists of phenomena that traditionally decrease or work against narrativity (e.g., disnarraton and negation). The chapter investigates more precisely the dynamics and the roles of the disnarrated, the distorted, the negated, and the omitted expressions of emotions in “Sleep” and the possible neural and cognitive responses they elicit from the reader.
