Abstrakt
The paper will outline the possibilities of interpretation of selected works by Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal, with respect to the question to what extent is the ethical perspective of these works shaped by the narrative representation of visual experience. Special attention will be paid to the accounts of eyewitness testimony and to the ways in which they contribute to the constitution of the protagonists' subjectivity and their intersubjective relations.
For the most part, we will be dealing with two novellas: I Served the King of England and All My Cats. Especially in case of the latter text, the author's handling of narrative focalization somewhat deviates from the trend of ethically ungrounded, judgement-withholding narrators we typically encounter in Hrabal's stories.
In the context of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of perception and ethics of Emmanuel Levinas, the paper will attempt to illustrate that this evocation of affective and ethical bonds of the focal character to the fictional world is achieved precisely through Hrabal's specific usage of the motifs of gaze and vision.