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      Generating Sympathy for Specific Characters and Events in Mandla Langa’s The Dead Men Who Lost Their Bones(1996)

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      UnisaRxiv
      UNISA Press
      narrational strategies, narrating voice, dialogism, sympathy, Gérard Genette, Mandla Langa, Mikhail Bakhtin
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            Abstract

            In this article, I investigate MandlaLanga’s short story, The Dead Men Who Lost Their Bones, by applying GérardGenette’s Narrative Discourse and Narrative Discourse Revisited along with MikhailBakhtin’s Dialogic Imagination to the text. By highlighting the way in which Langa employs narrational strategies to generate meaning in the story, I aim to correct the critical neglect of this aspect of his work. It is established that two narrational modes– intradiegetic–homodiegetic and intradiegetic–metadiegetic– are employed by two central characters in the narrative. The first character narrator is Clementine, the daughter of the second narrator, SimeonNgozi. This produces a heterodiegetic narrative, that is, a multiple narrative strategy. This multi-voiced polyphonic narrative accentuates the plight of the main characters and their struggles under oppressive and exploitive conditions in apartheid South Africa. It also generates sympathy for these events as well as for Clementine and her father.

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            Author and article information

            Journal
            UnisaRxiv
            UNISA Press
            1 December 2021
            Affiliations
            [1 ] Department of Afrikaans and Theory of Literature, University of South Africa, Pretoria, South Africa
            Author notes
            Author information
            https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9140-0023
            Article
            10.25159/UnisaRxiv/000026.v1
            55fb5869-4a8b-4270-8342-a8a3585f106b

            This work has been published open access under Creative Commons Attribution License CC BY 4.0 , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Conditions, terms of use and publishing policy can be found at www.scienceopen.com .

            History
            : 1 December 2021
            : 20 January 2022
            Funding
            None Not Applicable

            All data generated or analysed during this study are included in this published article (and its supplementary information files).
            Literary studies
            narrational strategies,narrating voice,dialogism,sympathy,Gérard Genette,Mandla Langa,Mikhail Bakhtin

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