“Man is Soul, Body, and Narrator”: Olga Tokarczuk’s Narrative Strategy

Abstract

The article is devoted to the prose of Olga Tokarczuk, one of the greatest Polishwriters of the turn of the twenty-first century. The most important constant of Tokarczuk’s worldview is the category of corporeality/materiality. The logic of corporeality/materiality on different levels determines the organization of texts, generates connections across motives and a common semantic field. The narrative of corporeality/materiality, leveraged by means of the writer’s frequent use of empathetic narrative, acts as a special construct by means of which Tokarczuk explores the reality of the surrounding world, but also communicates with it (through the potential recipient of the text). The article analyses the specificity of Tokarczuk’s visualisation of body practices in her prose (representations of the body, interaction of bodies, interaction of the body with the environment) and significant elements of the narrative structure directly connected with corporeality/materiality: the system of characters, the specificity of comparisons, basic ideas, the role of boundaries as an aesthetic and ethical category, as well as an artistic tool, and the moral purpose of the narrative.