In the Cracks between Narration and Experience : Narrative Dissonance in Literary Journalism

In fiction, narrative dissonance highlights a narrator’s retrospective perspective at the expense of a character’s perspective. In literary journalism/reportage, narrative dissonance presents a method for questioning any absolute truth in a specific context. As a narrative technique, it expresses a structural tension between the narrator and the main character, but it can also be created indirectly, through shifts in the narrator’s voice or a split within an experiencing character. The latter is possible with a double persona, belonging to a reporter who is working undercover. In literary journalism/reportage, there is additionally an approach that can be characterized by prospectivity, called alternative dissonance, for which there is no general counterpart in fiction. Consequently, it is possible to find not only a narrating reporter who questions her earlier experiences, but also to find an experiencing reporter who questions her forthcoming ability to tell a story. Using tools from narratology, this essay identifies and describes narrative constructions behind different kinds of dissonance in literary journalism and illustrates them with analysis examples selected from different traditions, times and countries. The analyses also demonstrate how these intricate narrative techniques fulfill different functions in different contexts but always enable a nuanced and complex picture of the depicted reality. Finally, crucial differences between dissonance in literary journalism andfiction are emphasized.