Zum Zusammenspiel von Erzähler- und Protagonistenperspektive in den Brenner-Romanen von Wolf Haas

Abstract

Abstract In this paper I show that a close look at the use of demonstrative pronouns (DPros) of the der/die/das paradigm in the crime novel Auferstehung der Toten (‘Resurrection of the dead’) by Wolf Haas allows us to gain a deeper understanding of the interplay of the narrator’s and the main protagonist’s perspective in narrative texts. At the same time, it provides an indirect argument against the assumption that the distribution of DPros can be fully derived from anti-logophoricity (Hinterwimmer and Bosch 2017) and in favor of an analysis sketched as an alternative in that paper: DPros avoid maximally prominent discourse referents as antecedents, where not only protagonists, but also narrators can be discourse referents. In text segments where the narrator’s perspective becomes prominent in virtue of evaluations, comments etc., the narrator is the maximally prominent discourse referent, while in text segments involving Free Indirect Discourse or other forms of protagonist’s perspective-taking such as Protagonist Projection (Holton 1997, Stokke 2013) or Viewpoint Shifting (Hinterwimmer 2017), the respective protagonist is the maximally prominent discourse referent. Finally, in text segments involving neutral narration where neither the narrator’s nor a protagonist’s perspective is salient, the respective discourse topic is the maximally prominent discourse referent.