Abstract
As a basic cognitive process of meaning construction, conceptual integration, or blending has been shown to operate in a variety of phenomena - from single words through literary metaphors to cartoons. These various examples are a testament to the fact that "blending is a central, orderly, powerful, systematic, and commonplace cognitive operation" occurring across a variety of contexts and situations.
Among other things, it has been also applied to narrative and the recent volume Blending and the Study of Narrative shows the profitability of conceptual integration application to various features of narrative. In the present paper, my interest lies in examining narratives with multiple narrators and the interaction of their individual stories.
More specifically, I look at narratives in which conflicting stories about the same element occur and I analyze in what ways these stories (considered as mental spaces) function in the reading process in which they are blended. Considering not only the stories' facts, but also various features of narrative prominence, I suggest how the similarities and conflicts of the individual stories are blended by the reader in the process of (re)constructing a "satisfying" narrative space.
I take as an example Karel Čapek's Meteor (Povětroň; 1934), a novel in which several narrators produce stories about one character that are to a lesser or greater extent in conflict. Paying attention not only to the content of these differing narratives (the "facts" and their verifiability), but also to the features of narrative form, I show how the story of the unknown patient is created through the process of blending these narrative spaces and to which specific aspects of the story, the reader attaches importance and why he/she does so.