Narrative Strategies and Linguistic Style in the Historical Fiction of Timeri N. Murari

The Style of the Opening of the Judean Novella

This article explores the literary style of the openings of three Judean novellas, Ruth, Esther, and Jonah, eliciting the different narrative techniques used to provide story background and shape audience expectation. First, using narratology, I identify a distinctive style of brisk, action-oriented narration which builds momentum and expectation for the story itself, a style I call perfective-panoramic narration, one which operates differently from the techniques normally associated with exposition in prose fiction. Next, I show how these novellas employ a technique which narratologists call etic openings, reliant on the textual and literary knowledge of its audience, thereby engendering a specific kind of fictionalization. Finally, I compare these stylistic features with contemporary practices in Demotic Egyptian novellas which corroborate these stylistic features as well as the use of certain fictionalizing techniques. The novellas, a coherent corpus of literature flourishing in the indigenous southeastern Mediterranean in the final centuries BCE, thus furnish important examples for the study of early forms of prose storytelling techniques, and for world literature and the history of prose fiction in general.

MEDIA NARRATIVE / GRAND NARRATIVE: ESSENTIAL CHARACTERISTICS IN A LINGUISTIC PERSPECTIVE

The article examines the main characteristics of the debatable categories of contemporary linguistics, namely the media narrative and the grand narrative. Particular emphasis is placed on the definitional content of these contested concepts, viewed through the prism of innovative linguistic approaches, including media linguistics, legal linguistics, linguistic image studies, and cognitive linguistics. The study analyzes the principal approaches to interpreting narrative as a discursive objectifier of media meanings and identifies its logical-structural as well as communicative-stylistic parameters. Using media phraseological units as retransmitters of media narrativity, the article demonstrates their effectiveness within information flows, often achieved through the combination of real and unreal facts embedded in precedent expressions. Phraseology frequently participates in the creation of narrative messages and, in some cases, itself becomes a separate narrative that is actualized and widely disseminated by the media. Narrativity expressed through media phraseological units enters a hierarchy of connections ranging from dominant (basic) to partial (local), which in Ukrainian-language communication constitutes a segment of strategic information communications oriented toward both domestic and foreign recipients. Special attention is paid to the functioning of grand narratives in the media space, their role in shaping collective perceptions, value orientations, and social meanings. It is demonstrated that the media narrative serves as a tool for the conceptualization of social reality, whereas the grand narrative functions as a model integrating individual narrative constructs into a coherent worldview system. The article also outlines prospects for further research into narrativity in the digital media environment and the integrality of linguistic knowledge within the broader humanities.

Vernacular Modernism and the Colonial Tongue: Narrative Strategies, Language, and Decoloniality in O.V. Vijayan and R.K. Narayan

This article does a comparative study of the narrative strategies of O.V.Vijayan (1930-2005) and R.K.Narayan (1906-2001), two towering figures in Indian Literature who worked in fundamentally different linguistic registers and with divergent aesthetic and political commitments. Vijayan, writing primarily in Malayalam, is positioned here as a practitioner of vernacular modernism whose linguistic experimentation with dialect, myth, and indigenous oral forms constitutes a form of decolonial praxis. His self-translations into English, rather than smoothing the rough edges of the vernacular, are read as acts of rewriting that negotiate the politics of translation and postcolonial representation. R.K. Narayan, by contrast, operated exclusively within the English literary tradition, adopting what might be termed a domesticated realism shaped in part by his relationship with Western publishing and mentorship. This paper argues that while Narayan’s Malgudi fiction performs a subtle resistance to colonial epistemologies through irony and humor, his narrative form remains embedded in Eurocentric realist convention that limits the scope of his decolonial critique. The paper subjects that claim to rigorous factchecking, nuancing the comparison where necessary, and situates both writers within the broader frameworks of postcolonial theory, Global South literary studies, and the politics of literary language. 

NARRATIVE STRATEGY AND INTERIOR MONOLOGUE IN J. D. SALINGER’S NOVEL “THE CATCHER IN THE RYE”

The article presents an extended analysis of the narrative strategy and the functioning of the interior monologue in J. D. Salinger’s novel “The Catcher in the Rye”, one of the key works of twentieth-century American literature. The study focuses on the specific features of the artistic organization of narration, the peculiarities of first-person narrative, and the role of the interior monologue as a leading means of revealing the psychological state of the protagonist, Holden Caulfield. It is established that the author employs a subjective form of narration that creates an effect of immediacy, emotional openness, and maximum proximity of the reader to the character’s inner world. The linguistic and stylistic features of the narrative are analyzed, including the active use of colloquial vocabulary, repetitions, emotionally colored expressions, fragmented syntactic structures, and internal remarks that reproduce the natural flow of the protagonist’s thoughts. It is demonstrated that the interior monologue in the novel performs not only a psychological but also a structural function, as it organizes the composition of the narrative and forms the integral image of the narrator. Such a type of narration allows the author to convey the complex process of the character’s self-reflection, his critical attitude toward social reality, his rejection of the hypocrisy of the adult world, and his painful experience of loneliness. Particular attention is paid to the interaction between narrative perspective and the protagonist’s internal conflict, which is manifested in the constant tension between the desire for sincere human relationships and alienation from society. It is established that Holden Caulfield’s interior monologue reflects the identity crisis typical of adolescence, an intensified sense of injustice, and a desire to preserve moral purity in a world the protagonist perceives as false and hypocritical. In this context, the narrative strategy of the novel contributes to a profound psychological depiction of the character while simultaneously representing broader sociocultural problems of the postwar generation. The study concludes that the combination of first-person narration with elements of interior monologue ensures the artistic integrity of the work and creates the effect of maximum psychological authenticity. Owing to this narrative organization, the image of Holden Caulfield acquires a generalized meaning and emerges as a symbol of a generation experiencing moral search, spiritual uncertainty, and a reassessment of life values. Thus, the narrative strategy of J. D. Salinger’s novel plays a decisive role in shaping its artistic structure and provides a deep representation of the existential issues addressed in the work.

Linguistic Features of the Formation of Imagery in the Poetry of Storytellers

The aim of this study was to identify how selected linguistic devices participate in the formation of poetic imagery in a purposively selected corpus of Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Turkish, and medieval Occitan poetic materials. The methodology was based on qualitative multistage analysis: historical and terminological review, operational coding of lexico-semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic–performative features, and cross-cultural comparison of the coded results. The source base included primary poetic texts, audiovisual performances, and secondary contextual materials. The analysis suggested that repetition, parallelism, formulaic constructions, epithets, and metaphorization organize imagery differently across the selected traditions. In the Central Asian Turkic block, repeated land–people and sky–earth imagery supported a collective–cosmic tendency; in the Turkish ashik material, recurrent spiritual lexemes and syntactic economy supported a mystical–contemplative tendency; and in the medieval Occitan material, pronouns, affective natural imagery, inversion, and sound organization supported an individual–anthropocentric tendency. The results should be interpreted as dominant tendencies within the selected corpus rather than as universal classifications of the traditions. The study contributes a working analytical framework for examining poetic imagery as a multilevel linguistic and cognitive mechanism.

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