The narrator-commentator in crime fiction

Abstract

The article examines the specifics of such kind of speech subject as the narrator-commentator in the genres of crime fiction: the classic detective story and the hard-boiled detective story. The narrator in these genres is “a witness and a judge” (Bakhtin). In the hard-boiled detective story that manifests itself not only in the character’s comments but in his actions also. To clarify the term “the narrator-commentator” the classic detective story and the hardboiled detective story are compared to the “detective rebus” and the police novel in which the narrator does not have the features of a commentator. By the term the author means the narrator, who takes an active part in the investigation and who almost any message to the reader accompanies with a personal assessment, and emphatically differentiates himself from other characters. The juxtaposition of the classic detective story and the hard-boiled detective story reveals the specifics of their subject structure. The Great Sleuth is never a subject of narration while the hard-boiled sleuth is both a narrator-commentator and a detective. Those genres also differ fundamentally in such aspects as the compositional-speech forms and method of aesthetic completion.
Completely unlike a classic detective story a hard-boiled one is characterized by the heteroglossia and multilingualism accordingly the appraisals variety.