The introduction of the novel – or long-form narrative prose in general – granted the writer a unique and expanded canvas on which to blend rhetoric and art. Here the writer is invited to both persuade and entertain, sometimes veiling the one with the other. On this canvas, a writer has the ability to create a picture of a world with a depth and breadth so similar to that of our own that the two can seem indistinguishable. Having established this image of verisimilitude, the writer – aided by a multitude of masks in the form of characters, voices and various narrative perspectives – is free to repaint the world according to his own vision, illustrating it as it really is, should, or unfortunately could happen. This is not to say, however, that a writer's portrait of the world contains the entire message. On a broad framework such as that afforded to narrative prose, it is not uncommon for a writer to make extensive use of negative space. That is, what an author says can be implicitly defined by what is not said. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original EssayTwo elements commonly manipulated to achieve this balance – or lack thereof – between positive and negative space are the perspective and identity of the narrator, as well as the chronology of the narrative. Although the very definition of narrative structure essentially dictates the presence of these two elements at least in their most basic forms, the way in which a writer chooses to manipulate them can have as much meaning for the work as the plot of the story itself. Two narrative works, Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day and Alison Bechdel's Fun Home, actively rely on the methods chosen to employ these elements in order to create a distinction between positive and negative space throughout the plot. Although technically different genres—one is a traditional novel, the other a graphic memoir—both The Remains of the Day and Fun Home make use of a first-person narrator and a retrospective chronology. In both works, these elements establish an uncertain foundation dominated by negative space, which the writers use to both structurally illustrate and thematically explore ideas of repression and lack of identity. If the third-person omniscient narrator wears the divine and omniscient halo, their title implies, then, that the first-person narrator, in contrast, must endure the flaws of man. In essence, while the presence of a first-person narrator is by no means a suggestion of evil, it does imply that the narrator brings with him some sort of dubious quality or other noteworthy failure. Often this “failure” is nothing more significant than the typical flaws inherent in the human condition – i.e. the inability to fully understand the circumstances surrounding a given event, or simply the natural propensity for human error. However, the presence of a first-person narrator may also signal the possibility of a more significantly flawed narrator: the unreliable narrator. In The Remains of the Day, Ishiguro employs an unreliable narrator in the form of Stevens, the novel's central character. Although any first-person narrator is incapable of being completely reliable due to the general restrictions of human nature, his occasional inability to fully tell the truth is often noted only when it serves to mobilize some specific aspect of the plot. Stevens's unreliability, however, implicitly drives the entire plot of the novel. His inability to tell the truth – however unconscious – separates the novel from a particularly boring story of a devoteeEnglish butler, instead leaving a comment on the dangers of repression and the struggle to find identity. Ishiguro wastes no time in identifying Stevens as an unreliable narrator. Indeed, the novel's opening sentence marks the narrator's first faltering attempt at declaration, with Stevens making the heavily diluted statement: "It seems more and more likely that I will indeed undertake the expedition which has been preoccupying my imagination for some days now" (Ishiguro, 3). Here, Stevens' apparent need to temper a seemingly insignificant statement with dubious adverbs strongly warns that he is unreliable, not only in a general sense, but especially in expressing his own feelings and opinions. Although rarely, Stevens occasionally recalls his own record of the events under discussion, in keeping with his characteristic obsession with detail. In one instance, after recounting a past conversation between himself and Miss Kenton, Stevens begins to correct himself, saying, "Now that I think of it, I'm not sure Miss Kenton spoke so boldly that day... In fact, now that Now that I think about it, I have a feeling that it might have been Lord Darlington himself who made this particular observation” (Ishiguro, 60). evident reluctance to express any kind of emotion or clear opinion, highlights the depth of his repression Ultimately, as a narrator, Stevens is much more valuable for what he does not say than for what he does convey Stevens's unnecessary qualifying adverbs than Stevens himself ever did in his long-winded discussions of the merits of "Giffen, undoubtedly the best silver polish available" (Ishiguro, 133). As the novel continues, Stevens's unnecessarily formal speech gives him patterns and meandering syntax remain unchanged, and his reluctance to admit his own opinions and ideas becomes increasingly apparent as he recalls what should be progressively more intense memories. Stevens is perhaps particularly emotionless when recounting his father's death. Although Stevens behaves in a typically cold and distant manner during the incident, his true susceptibility to emotion – and the depth of his desire to repress it – is betrayed by the revelation of his crying at one point in the evening. The mere fact that Stevens cries, however, is less significant than the way Ishiguro conveys this information. At no point does Stevens himself explicitly refer to this state of affairs. Rather, this revelation only comes to light through dialogue in which a guest at Darlington Hall remarks to Stevens, “You look like you're crying” (Ishiguro, 105). Even after this observation, however, Stevens as narrator never confirms or denies the statement, simply choosing to ignore it altogether. Here, once again, Ishiguro uses his unreliable narrator as a pawn, constructing the novel's true narrative in the space left by what Stevens doesn't say. As the novel continues, the correlation between the intensity of Stevens' emotions and his attempts to distance himself also increases. himself from them. In a notable passage in which Stevens looks with regret at his actions, or lack thereof, towards Miss Kenton, he even goes so far as to replace the appropriate first-person pronouns required by the narrative style with the ambiguous third-person pronoun “one ,” saying, “Of course, when you look back at these cases today, they can truly appear as crucial and precious moments in one's life; but of course, at that moment, this was not the impression one had. Rather, it was as if one had toavailable an infinite number of days, months, years in which to resolve the vagaries of one's relationship with Miss Kenton..." (Ishiguro, 179). Here, this change in pronoun use is not only unorthodox, but also somewhat incongruous, and Stevens's attempt at ambiguity is unconvincing and perhaps even logically inconsistent. There is no doubt about the identity of the subject whose “affair with Miss Kenton” Stevens is discussing, leaving his lapse into third-person ambiguity simply another rhetorical maneuver to distance himself from his feelings. Here, Stevens is so reluctant to accept his own feelings and assert himself as an individual that he essentially resorts to temporarily abandoning his position as first-person narrator. In this way, Stevens's untrustworthiness not only signals his deeply rooted tendency towards repression, but also its consequences. Here, Ishiguro illustrates Stevens' repression that essentially leads him to abandon his identity as a narrator, suggesting broader overall consequences of repression on identity. Ultimately, as a narrator, Stevens is a kind of parody of himself, essentially serving the opposite function of a conventional narrator. . While traditionally a narrator functions as a sort of tool or messenger through which an author projects his or her own ideas or opinions, Ishiguro deliberately speaks around Stevens, rather than through him. As the reader gradually learns to see through Stevens's watery statements and incomplete versions of events, Ishiguro's own voice echoes in the negative space surrounding the narrow scope of Stevens's world. In composing a memoir, Alison Bechdel had significantly less opportunity for variation in choosing a messenger. through which to convey his narrative. While Ishiguro was free to manipulate his narrative technique, ultimately creating a stark contrast between himself and his narrator, the narrator of a personal memoir must almost necessarily be the author himself. In this way, the narrative styles of these two works – although both in the first person – initially seem quite different, with Ishiguro speaking around his narrator and Bechdel having no choice but to speak directly through his. However, while Bechdel cannot match Stevens' style in understanding unreliability, he is by no means unaware of his own lack of omniscience. In Fun Home, Bechdel explores a more casual type of unreliability in the human inability to fully understand the circumstances surrounding a given event. Where Ishiguro constructs his narrative within the negative space created by Stevens' unreliability, Bechdel constructs hers within that created by the inevitable gaps in human knowledge. For Bechdel, this idea of ​​negative space or “reading between the lines” can be taken a little more literally, as – in producing a graphic memoir – she effectively fills the space between her words with illustrations. In Fun Home, Bechdel primarily analyzes the gaps in her understanding regarding not only the circumstances of her father's death, but also those of her life. One of the ways he tries to fill these gaps is through his illustrations. Throughout the memoir, Bechdel includes a series of images depicting his father's death, an event he did not actually witness. In creating these illustrations, Bechdel is free to recreate and in some way own an important aspect of her life of which she has incomplete knowledge. Furthermore, even if in words the threat of becoming unreliable forces Bechdel to moderate his statements on the event, using qualifiers such as “Maybenoticed that the truck was coming” (Bechdel, 28), in her illustrations, Bechdel is free to recreate the event without restrictions or other indications of uncertainty. In this way, the illustrations give Bechdel the opportunity to fill in the knowledge gaps that pervade his narrative. In other cases, however, Bechdel's illustrations serve a different function. Bechdel often uses these images to subtly suggest ideas to the reader before explicitly conveying them in words. Before actually commenting on her father's sexuality, Bechdel, for example, includes an illustration depicting him in church casting a questionable sideways glance at a procession of altar boys. Although Bechdel accompanies the image with the attached caption, separate from the rest of the page's text, "But would an ideal husband and father have sex with teenagers?" (Bechdel, 17), the illustration itself attempts to convey the idea with a sort of real-life subtlety. Essentially, as a narrator, Bechdel attempts to accurately recreate the repression that dominated much of her family life, using illustrations to suggest ideas that, equally, could only have been suggested to her at the time. As first-person narrators, both Bechdel and Stephens inevitably suffer from imperfections that would not afflict an omniscient. narrator. Meanwhile, a sense of repression also dominates the lives of both narrators. In The Remains of the Day, Stevens' repressive tendencies create a kind of negative space in which Ishiguro reflects the truth hidden in the voids left by the narrator's repression. Bechdel, meanwhile, takes a different approach. Aware of the vacancies left in his life, largely due to a family tendency towards repression, Bechdel attempts to fill them, attempting to reclaim pieces of his life by repurposing them into multiple art forms. In both cases, the authors manipulate the negative space left by their narrators' imperfections to create a multidimensional narrative. In addition to similarities in narrative style, The Remains of the Day and Fun Home also share parallels in the retrospective structure of their timeline. While Fun Home is told entirely in sporadic, non-linear flashbacks, Ishiguro uses a somewhat more linear structure, featuring a retrospective timeline interspersed with the narrative's entire present-day timeline. Both authors use these chronological structures not only to illustrate their narrators' fixation on the past, but also the ways in which they use the past in attempts to reconstruct their identities. The narrative plot of The Remains of the Day follows Stevens on a six-day trip to Cornwall in 1956. Although in this, as in all things, Stevens is "happy to have distractions kept to a minimum" (Ishiguro, 52 ), often lapses into reminiscences about his life at Darlington Hall in the 1920s and 1930s. Stevens expresses annoyance at his own tendency to remember, at one point interrupting the narrative with the self-directed reproach, “But I see I'm worrying about these memories and that's perhaps a little silly” (Ishiguro, 67). However, as Stevens's constant memories continue largely unchecked, it becomes clear that Ishiguro intends to house most of the novel's meaning in this part of the narrative that Stevens does not strictly intend to relate. Stevens' flashbacks often end with some sort of brief summary or reflection, suggesting an attempt to reconstruct a favorable identity based on these memories. Concluding the episode relating to his father's death, Stevens observes: "Despite all its sad associations, whenever I recall that evening today, I find I do so with a great sense of triumph."(Ishiguro, 110). Similarly, after recounting two separate instances in which he lied about his past association with Lord Darlington, Stevens concludes the incident with the somewhat incongruous statement that: "Looking back over my career thus far, my chief satisfaction comes from what I achieved during those years." years, and today I am nothing but proud and grateful to have been given such a privilege” (Ishiguro, 126). Not only do these statements about his past signal that Stevens feels the need to establish his identity, but his reputation as an unreliable narrator also suggests that he fails to do so accurately. Stevens' fixation on the past gradually illustrates the fact that he has linked his identity is inextricably linked to Lord Darlington and a life of subservience, which essentially amounts to no real identity. Following Miss Kenton's reminder that “There's no turning back time now” (Ishiguro, 239), Stevens is forced to acknowledge his own lack of individual identity, lamenting, “'I can't even say I made my mistakes. Really – one must ask – what dignity is there in this?'” (Ishiguro, 243). Through Fun Home's equally retrospective chronology, Bechdel takes a more active approach to piecing together the fragments of her past into a unified identity. While Ishiguro highlights the negative space created by Stevens' lack of identity and reluctant obsession with the past, Bechdel once again decides to substitute other art forms to fill the gaps in his identity. This time, Bechdel's substitutions take the form of intertextuality, with the author illustrating parallels between events in her life and various literary works. Perhaps the most comprehensive literary allusion that Bechdel employs in Fun Home is to the story of Icarus and Daedalus, which refers to his relationship with his father. In the memoir's opening pages, Bechdel, illustrated as a child, foreshadows her father's impending death in relation to Greek myth, saying, "In our particular reenactment of this mythical relationship, it was not I but my father who fell." from heaven” (Bechdel, 4). As Bechdel continues through carefully woven flashbacks and foreshadowing, she unifies the fractured chronology in which she presents her troubled life with constant literary allusions. Next, Bechdel devotes a portion of the memoir to a comparison between her father's life and the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald, arguing that “parallels are inevitable” (Bechdel, 63). Reflecting on her father's fascination with Fitzgerald, Bechdel takes intertextuality a step further, suggesting that "what was so fascinating to my father about Fitzgerald's stories was their inextricability from Fitzgerald's life" (Bechdel, 65). In a sort of multi-step illustration of art imitating life, Bechdel seeks to draw parallels between Fitzgerald's life and works and his father's life, using both as crucial tools in his own artwork. After noting that her father and Fitzgerald died at the same age, Bechdel even goes so far as to suggest that her father "had planned his death with this in mind, as some sort of deranged tribute" (Bechdel, 86). Here, Bechdel makes very obvious use of intertextuality in attempting to explain the circumstances surrounding her father's death – a mystery that includes one of the biggest mistakes of her life and identity. As the memoir continues, the timeline remains decidedly non-linear, with the sparse and sporadic timeline mirroring the turbulent nature of Bechdel's life. Throughout the narrative, general literary allusions remain a constant, with comparisons ranging from Oscar's The Importance of Being Earnest.