Narrative Voices in the Novel "The Name of the Rose" by Umberto Eco

Recently, researchers have turned a considerable attention to the problems of narratives and narrators in literary works, especially of postmodern literature, although many unexplored aspects remain. Narrative voices and their manifestations in literary works is one of such example, so the present research paper “Narrative Voices in U. Eco’s Novel The Name of the Rose” is devoted to this issue.
The goal is to investigate, how the author has used the narrative voices in the novel, to consider their functions in the promotion of the narrative and to analyse the relations among various elements of the narrative. In order to reach the goal, it is planned to read and analyse the literature in literary theory and criticism available about such issues as narratology, semiotics, history of literary theory and Umberto Eco’s literary work. The paper will provide an insight into the most essential terms and ideas of the field and the author will find the definitions necessary of these terms for the work. The theoretical background will be used to compare the theoretical assumptions with the practical appliance of the narrative voices in the novel. The practical analysis of the text of The Name of the Rose is expected to lead to conclusions about the functions of narrative voices in the formation of the narrative within a particular work.
Evidently, it is possible to judge about the presence of one or another narrative voice by various signs pointing out to different codes applied in the narratives. The task of this paper is to detect these signs and find out their functions.
The paper consists of three chapters with the relevant subchapters. The first chapter is intended for a short introduction to the problems of semiotics that may be related to the issue of narrative voices. The second chapter gives a general characterization of narratives and their structures. The third chapter is devoted to the practical analysis of the signs presenting different narrative voices in the novel The Name of the Rose in order to check the theoretical assumptions in the practical conditions of a real text. …