The Narratorial Function in Minimalist Fiction

The essay engages only narratorial strategies that are manifestations of essential features of the minimalist narrative in contemporary American fiction. Minimalism reduces text-level agency through narratorial functional disorders (devices that block those functions) and limits them further, even effaces them completely, in figural narratives whose focalizer is an inarticulate character. The consequential psyche (if the narrator is of this type) and phenomenological presentation together can result in almost complete information blackout in some works by Joy Williams, Jay McInerney, or Bret Easton Ellis.[PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]