The introduction to the novel—or to long-form narrative prose in general—gave the writer a unique and expanded canvas on which to blend rhetoric and art. Here the writer is asked to both persuade and entertain, sometimes veiling one with the other. On this canvas, a writer has the ability to create a picture of a world with a depth and breadth so similar to our own that the two can seem indistinguishable. Having established this image of verisimilitude, the writer – aided by a multitude of masks in the form of characters, voices and various narrative perspectives – is free to repaint the world according to his own vision, illustrating it as it actually is, should, or unfortunately could happen. This does not mean, however, that a writer's reimagined portrait of the world contains the entirety of his or her message. On a canvas as vast as that given to narrative prose, it is not uncommon for a writer to make intensive use of negative space. In other words, what an author says can be implicitly defined by what is not said. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an Original EssayTwo elements commonly manipulated in order to achieve this balance – or lack of balance – between positive and negative space are the narrator's perspective and identity, and the timeline of the story. Although the very definition of narrative structure essentially mandates the presence of these two elements, at least in their most basic forms, how a writer chooses to manipulate them can be as important to the work as the plot of the story itself. Two narrative works, Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day and Alison Bechdel's Fun Home, actively rely on their chosen methods of employing these elements to create a distinction between positive and negative space throughout. throughout the storyline. Although technically different genres – one a traditional novel, the other a graphic memoir – The Remains of the Day and Fun Home both use a first-person narrator as well as a retrospective timeline. In both works, these elements establish an uncertain foundation dominated by negative space, which the writers use to both structurally illustrate and thematically explore ideas of repression and lack of identity. If the third-person omniscient narrator bears the divine, omniscient halo his title implies, then the first-person narrator, on the other hand, must then bear the man's flaws. Essentially, while the presence of a first-person narrator is in no way a suggestion of evil, it does imply that the narrator exhibits some sort of questionable quality or other notable failing. Often this "failure" is nothing more significant than the typical flaws intrinsic to being human - that is, an inability to fully understand the circumstances surrounding a given event, or simply the propensity natural to human error. However, the presence of a first-person narrator can also signal the possibility of a more wasted storyteller: the unreliable narrator. In The Remains of the Day, Ishiguro employs an unreliable narrator in the form of Stevens, the novel's central character. Although any first-person narrator is incapable of being completely reliable due to the general restrictions of human nature, his or her occasional inability to fully tell the truth is often noticed only when it serves to mobilize a specific aspect of the story. 'plot. Stevens's unreliability, however, implicitly determines the novel's entire plot. His inability to tell the storyTruth – even unconscious – separates the novel from the particularly boring story of a devoted English butler, leaving instead a commentary on the dangers of repression and the struggle to find an identity. Ishiguro wastes no time identifying Stevens as an unreliable narrator. In fact, the first sentence of the novel marks the narrator's first hesitant attempt at a declaration, with Stevens making the very diluted statement: "It seems more and more likely that I will actually undertake the expedition which has preoccupied my imagination for some days" ( Ishiguro, 3). Here, Stevens' apparent need to temper a seemingly inconsequential statement with questionable adverbs strongly warns that he is unreliable, not only in a general sense, but particularly in expressing his own feelings and opinions. Although rarely, Stevens occasionally calls his own account of events in question, in keeping with his characteristic obsession with detail. In one instance, after recounting a past conversation between him and Miss Kenton, Stevens begins to correct himself by saying, "Now that I think about it more, I'm not sure Miss Kenton spoke so boldly that day -there… In fact, now that I think about it, I have the feeling that perhaps it was Lord Darlington himself who made that particular remark” (Ishiguro, 60). Stevens' obsession with detail – both as narrator and butler – contrasting with his obvious reluctance to express any sort of emotion or clear opinion highlights the depth of his repression. Ultimately, as a narrator, Stevens is considerably more valuable for what he doesn't say than for what he does. Ishiguro says much more about the discrepancies between Stevens's useless qualifying adverbs than Stevens himself ever does in his lengthy discussions of the merits of "Giffen, undoubtedly the best silver polish available" (Ishiguro, 133) . As the novel continues, Stevens's unnecessarily formal speech patterns and circuitous syntax remain unwavering, and his reluctance to take ownership of his opinions and ideas becomes increasingly evident as he remembers what should be more and more intense memories. Stevens is perhaps most devoid of emotion when he recounts his father's death. Although throughout the incident Stevens behaves in a typically cold and distant manner, his true susceptibility to emotion – and the depth of his desire to repress it – is betrayed by the eventual revelation of his crying at some point in the evening. The mere fact that Stevens is crying, however, is less significant than how Ishiguro conveys this information. At no time does Stevens himself explicitly relate this state of affairs. Rather, this revelation only appears through a dialogue in which a guest at Darlington Hall remarks to Stevens: “You look like you're crying” (Ishiguro, 105). However, even after this remark, Stevens, as narrator, never confirms or denies this claim, simply choosing to ignore it completely. Here, once again, Ishiguro uses his unreliable narrator as a pawn, creating the novel's true narrative in the space left by what Stevens does not say. As the novel continues, the correlation between the intensity of Stevens' emotions and his attempts to distance himself also increases. himself from them. In one notable passage in which Stevens regrets his actions, or lack thereof, towards Miss Kenton, he even goes so far as to substitute the appropriate first person pronouns expected of the storytelling style for the ambiguous third person pronoun. "one", saying: "Naturally, when we look back on such events today, they canactually appear as crucial and precious moments of life; but of course, at the time, that wasn't the impression we had. It was rather as if one had an infinite number of days, months, years to sort out the vagaries of one's relationship with Miss Kenton…” (Ishiguro, 179). Here, this shift in pronoun usage is not only unorthodox, but also somewhat incongruous, and Stevens's attempt at ambiguity is unconvincing and perhaps even logically incoherent. There is no doubt as to the identity of the subject of whom Stevens speaks of "the relationship with Miss Kenton", leaving his descent into third-person ambiguities simply another rhetorical maneuver to distance himself from his feelings. Here, Stevens is so reluctant to accept his own feelings and assert himself as an individual that he essentially resorts to momentarily abandoning his position as first-person narrator. In this way, Stevens's unreliability signals not only his deep-rooted tendency toward repression, but also its consequences. Here, Ishiguro illustrates Stevens' repression that led him to essentially abandon his identity as narrator, suggesting broader global consequences of repression on identity. Ultimately, as a narrator, Stevens is a sort of parody of himself, essentially performing the opposite function of a conventional narrator. . While traditionally a narrator functions as a sort of tool or messenger through which an author projects his or her own ideas or opinions, Ishiguro deliberately speaks around Stevens rather than through him. As the reader gradually learns to see through Stevens' watery assertions and incomplete versions of events, Ishiguro's own voice resonates in the negative space surrounding the narrow scope of Stevens' world. In composing her memoir, Alison Bechdel had much less opportunity for variation in the choice of a messenger. through which to convey his story. While Ishiguro was free to manipulate his storytelling technique, ultimately creating a stark contrast between himself and his narrator, the narrator of a personal memoir must almost necessarily be the author himself. In this way, the narration styles of these two works – although both in the first person – initially seem very different, with Ishiguro speaking around his narrator and Bechdel having no choice but to speak directly through the narrator. his. However, even though Bechdel cannot match the all-encompassing unreliability, she is by no means ignorant of her own lack of omniscience. In Fun Home, Bechdel explores a more informal form of unreliability in the human inability to fully understand the circumstances surrounding a given event. Where Ishiguro constructs his narrative in the negative space created by Stevens's unreliability, Bechdel constructs his in that created by the inevitable gaps in human knowledge. For Bechdel, this idea of ​​negative space or “reading between the lines” can be taken a little more literally: because – in producing a graphic memoir – she actually fills the space between her words with illustrations. In Fun Home, Bechdel analyzes above all his errors of understanding concerning not only the circumstances of his father's death, but also those of his life. One of the ways she seeks to fill these gaps is through her illustrations. Throughout her memoir, Bechdel includes a number of images depicting her father's death – an event she did not actually witness. In creating these illustrations, Bechdel is free to recreate and, in a way, owns an important aspect of her life of which she has incomplete knowledge. Moreover,even if verbally the threat of becoming unreliable forces Bechdel to temper his statements about the event, using qualifiers like "Maybe he didn't notice the truck was coming" (Bechdel, 28), in his illustrations, Bechdel is free to recreate the event without restrictions or other indications of uncertainty. In this way, the illustrations allow Bechdel to fill in the knowledge gaps that permeate his own narrative. In other cases, however, Bechdel's illustrations serve a different function. Bechdel often uses these images to subtly suggest ideas to the reader before conveying them explicitly through words. Before Bechdel actually comments on her father's sexuality, for example, she includes an illustration in which she depicts him in a church casting a questionable sidelong glance at a procession of altar boys. Although Bechdel accompanies the image with the attached caption, separate from the rest of the text on the page: "But would an ideal husband and father have sex with teenagers?" (Bechdel, 17), the illustration itself attempts to convey the idea with a kind of real subtlety. Essentially, as a narrator, Bechdel attempts to accurately recreate the repression that dominated much of his family life, using illustrations to suggest ideas that, similarly, could only have been suggested to him at the time. 'era. As first-person narrators, Bechdel and Stephens inevitably suffer from imperfections that would not torment an omniscient. narrator. Meanwhile, a sense of repression also dominates the lives of both narrators. In The Remains of the Day, Stevens's repressive tendencies create a kind of negative space in which Ishiguro reflects the truth hidden in the gaps left by the narrator's repression. Bechdel, meanwhile, takes a different approach. Aware of the voids left in her life largely due to a family tendency toward repression, Bechdel attempts to fill them, striving to reclaim pieces of her life by rendering them in multiple art forms. In both cases, the authors manipulate the negative space left by their narrators' imperfections in order to create a multidimensional narrative. Besides similarities in storytelling style, The Remains of the Day and Fun Home also share parallels in the retrospective structure of their timeline. While Fun Home is told entirely in sporadic, non-linear flashbacks, Ishiguro uses a somewhat more linear structure, featuring an ongoing retrospective timeline interspersed within the current timeline of the frame narrative. Both authors use these chronological structures not only to illustrate their narrators' fixation on the past, but also the ways in which they use the past to attempt to reconstruct their identities. The narrative setting of The Remains of the Day follows Stevens over a period of six days in Cornwall in 1956. Although in this, as in all things, Stevens is "glad to have distractions kept to a minimum" ( Ishiguro, 52), he frequently thinks back to memories of his life at Darlington Hall in the 1920s and 30s. Stevens expresses annoyance at his own tendency to reminisce, at one point interrupting the narrative with a self-reprimand directed: “But I see that I'm becoming preoccupied with these memories and maybe that's a bit stupid” (Ishiguro, 67). However, as Stevens' constant recollections continue largely unchecked, it becomes clear that Ishiguro plans to lodge the majority of the novel's meaning in that part of the narrative that Stevens does not strictly intend to tell. Stevens' flashbacks often end with some sort of brief summaryor reflection, suggesting an attempt to reconstruct a favorable identity from these memories. In concluding the episode chronicling his father's death, Stevens remarks: "For all its sad associations, whenever I remember this evening today, I find that I do so with a great sense of triumph." (Ishiguro, 110). Similarly, after recounting two separate instances in which he lied about his past association with Lord Darlington, Stevens concludes the incident with the following somewhat incongruous statement: "In looking back on my career thus far, my chief satisfaction comes from what I have accomplished over the years. years, and today I am nothing but proud and grateful to have received such a privilege” (Ishiguro, 126). Not only do these claims about his past indicate that Stevens feels the need to establish his identity, but his reputation as an unreliable narrator also suggests that he fails to do so accurately. Stevens's fixation on the past gradually illustrates that he has linked his identity inextricably linked to Lord Darlington and a life of submission, essentially amounting to a lack of true identity at all. Following Miss Kenton's reminder that "there's no going back now" (Ishiguro, 239), Stevens is forced to recognize his own lack of individual identity, lamenting, "'I can't even say that I made my own mistakes.' Really – one has to ask – what dignity is there in that? unified identity. While Ishiguro points out the negative space created by Stevens' lack of identity and his reluctant obsession with the past, Bechdel once again begins to substitute other art forms to fill the gaps in his identity. This time, Bechdel's substitutions take the form of intertextuality, with the author illustrating parallels between events in his own life and various literary works. Perhaps the most comprehensive literary allusion Bechdel uses in Fun Home is that of the story of Icarus and Daedalus, which she tells of her relationship with her father. In the first pages of the memoir, Bechdel, shown as a child, foreshadows the imminent demise of her father in relation to the Greek myth, saying: "In our particular reconstruction of this mythical relationship, it was not I but my father who had to collapse. from heaven” (Bechdel, 4). As Bechdel continues through the carefully interwoven flashbacks and foreshadowing, she unifies the fractured timeline in which she presents her troubled life with constant literary allusions. Later, Bechdel devoted part of his memoir to a comparison between his father's life and the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald, stating that "the parallels are inevitable" (Bechdel, 63). Reflecting on his father's fascination with Fitzgerald, Bechdel takes intertextuality even further, suggesting that "what appealed to my father so much about Fitzgerald's stories was their inextricability from Fitzgerald's life" (Bechdel, 65). In a sort of multistage illustration of life imitating art, Bechdel seeks to draw parallels between Fitzgerald's life and works and the life of his father, using both as crucial devices in his own work. 'art. After noting that his father and Fitzgerald had died at the same age, Bechdel even goes so far as to suggest that his father "timed his death with this in mind, as a sort of deranged tribute" (Bechdel, 86) . Here, Bechdel makes a very obvious use of intertextuality in an attempt to explain the circumstances surrounding his father's death – a mystery that constitutes one of the greatest errors of his own life and identity. As the memoir continues, the timeline remains decidedly non-linear, with the.