Refugees and narrators: a narratological approach to the treatment of the Asia minor refugee in modern Greek novels

Abstract

In this thesis, I examine the structures of a variety of modern Greek novels referring to the Asia Minor refugees to examine how the form of a text articulates a message to produce a particular effect on the reader. By applying Gérard Genette s methods of structural narratology, my main aim is to determine the role of refugee characters within the narrative situations. This will allow us to explore the depiction of the refugees within these narratological conventions and will indicate the authors choices in employing particular narrative techniques to present the refugees. In this way, we may be able to determine whether the treatment of refugee characters in the narrative structure of the novel can be correlated with the author s level of perceived historical experience of the refugee situation in Greece. One might expect that as a result of the refugee writers personal background they would give more emphasis to the refugees by using them as narrators of their own stories than authors from Constantinople and the Greek mainland; however, a major finding of the way these authors use the refugees in their narrative situations shows that this is not the case. The chapters of this thesis are organised according to the narrative situations identified from the examination of the 13 novels that fit the appropriate criteria set for this study. Each novel had to include the theme of the Asia Minor refugee in Greece after the Asia Minor Disaster. As well as this, the author s biography had to suggest the possibility of their direct knowledge of the refugees in Greece, either by being a refugee, witnessing the influx or by living amongst them after their immediate arrival. Ultimately, what I ask is: How do authors who simply observed the refugees situation and refugee authors who experienced this situation at first-hand employ the refugee character in narratological conventions? In addition, what are the affects of these techniques on the reader s perception of the refugee characters in the novels?