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The Orality of Amadou Kuruma's Novel: Allah n'est pas obligé

  • Cross-Cultural Studies
  • 2022, 67(), pp.111-142
  • Publisher : Center for Cross Culture Studies
  • Research Area : Humanities > Literature
  • Received : September 5, 2022
  • Accepted : October 4, 2022
  • Published : October 31, 2022

LEE Kyung-Lae 1

1경희대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This paper explored the restoration and transformation of the traditional oral literature in African contemporary literature, especially in the genre of novels. These narrative devices from the oral tradition stand out for their focus on storytelling rather than the subject matters or contents dealt with in traditional literature. With regard to the contrast between an oral tradition and the contemporary literature in storytelling, this paper focused on the status of the narrator and the narrative style in the way of analyzing Ahmadou Kourouma's novel Allah n'est pas obligé. First of all, the status of the difficult narrator worked as a narrative device that makes appeals directly to the audience (reader) and induces communication with the audience (reader) by setting up dialogic situations in various ways. On the other hand, the subjective voice of the narrator-hero was regarded as a narrative strategy to achieve the author's ideological purpose of revealing and reflecting the reality of African society. As for the narrative style, in this novel, three major methods - circularity, repetition, and orality - were prominent. This novel demonstrated how circular logic affects the work in a variety of ways by adopting a narrative structure where its beginning and concluding parts overlapped. In addition, the repetition of various forms - vocabulary, expressions, sentences, narrative sequences, narrative structures - can be said to be a typical oral narrative method from the oral tradition. The oral characteristics of the narrative act itself also appeared in various forms such as interrogative sentences, exclamations, parentheses, and proverbs. It was shown that Kourouma’s writing strategy in adopting the way of oral storytelling was effective in conveying the messages he wanted to the reader.

Citation status

* References for papers published after 2023 are currently being built.

This paper was written with support from the National Research Foundation of Korea.