A Móra Ferenc Múzeum Évkönyve: Studia Historiae Literarum et Artium, 2. (Szeged, 1999)

Czetter Ibolya: A narráció stilisztikája néhány Tömörkény-novellában

the features characterizing the narrative horizon, the paper establishes a specific duality typical of the narrative status of short stories: they present their subject matter mostly from one angle that belongs to one of the main characters, identifying him with folk awareness and consciousness and, at the same time, segregating him from it. The means for keeping a distance is, e.g., the narrator's interlocution, interjection, or mixing or confronting dialectal code with general colloquial accent. The chapter on narrative tone deals with the differentiation of the three categories of citing (direct and reported speech, free reported speech, and thought) and the description of the differences between them in terms of their role in short epical works, along with their intratextual distribution. The paper points out Tömörkény's excellent ability to create an atmosphere and maintain „linguistic conformance", and then reveals the secrets of his imitative skills. A characteristic feature of the texts displaying an internal linguistic stratification is dialectism, preference to archaic forms based on folk-speech, and predominance of spoken language manifesting itself partly in the stock of words and expressions used, and partly in sentence structure. The merging of narrative forms can be seen as a possibility for making style more compact and also as a procedure that calls for collaborative cooperation on part of the recipient. Finally, the author emphasizes the importance, for the history of culture, of secondary epical narrative forms including descriptions, and also the anthropomorphic and pantheistic character of physiographic works. As a conclusion, the paper stresses Tömörkény's advanced narrative technique and assigns the writer's story-writing to one of the best prozaic epical masterpieces. 153