GENRE AND STRUCTURAL FEATURES OF M. ONDATZHE'S NOVEL «WARLIGHT»

Abstract

The research focuses on identifying the features of the genre structure of Michael Ondaatje's novel «Warlight». The novel is written in the format of a free retrospective and reflective narrative of the «I-narrator» Nathaniel Williams about the teenage period of his life in London at the end of World War II and in the first post-war decades. The «coming-of-age» story, despite its «chamber» nature, unfolds in the novel in the background of important social and historical events of the modern era and is determined by the complex vicissitudes of the narrator's relations with representatives of different strata of English society in the second half of the twentieth century. The novel consists of two parts, which differ significantly in narrative and poetic paradigm. The first part (6 chapters) is retrospective memories, which are only occasionally interrupted by insertions from the indefinite «present». Instead, the second part (14 chapters) is more of the narrator's fantasy, when he either reconstructs individual episodes of his mother's life from fragmentary stories about her from people who knew her, or imagines how certain events in the past could have unfolded. At the same time, in both parts there is an interweaving of narrative plans that differ in time and space. The protagonist's declared idea that the past never remains in the past is confirmed by the history of his entire life. Reflections on how the past influences the future, shapes and intertwines people's destinies, determine the poetic and stylistic features of the novel. So the specificity of the «coming of age» story is determined by the interweaving of genre and style strategies of bildungsroman, story of self-discovery, spy novel, quest narrative, moral and philosophical novel.