Author-Function and Modes of Writing in Narration: Reading Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s <i>One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich</i> and Julian Barnes’ <i>The Noise of Time</i>

Abstract

The present study attempts to demonstrate how different texts with various author attitudes depict the oppressed subjects of Stalin's time. For this purpose, Roland Barthes' notion of ‘Modes of Writing' and Michel Foucault's concept of ‘author' are employed in reading Alexander Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1963) and Julian Barnes' The Noise of Time (2016). The two novels mainly address the politically subjected characters in the Stalinist regime with different standpoints of author figure. Originating the authors' modes of writing in the mentioned texts, on one hand, and the analysis of author-function, on the other, shall satisfy the comparative tendencies in this research and show how these theoretical frameworks can help a critical understanding of the texts. The subjects described in these novels, although similar in their situations and characteristics and subjected to the same institution of power, are narrated from different author roles and provide a somewhat similar subjectivity. The author figure as a subject of ideology and the text as a created object of an author can be thoroughly analyzed within the proposed theoretical framework; therefore, the main objective of this paper is to explore the depicted subjectivities of similar subjects from different standpoints of distinguishable author figures.