The photography in the novel by Serbian writer Ivan Tokin “The Most Normal Man in the World”

Abstract

Tokin’s debut novel “The Most Normal Man in the World” was released in 2014 and has gone through more than ten reprints. Written in the first person, it resembles a diary describing certain events in the life of the main character. The novel consists of 49 small chapters, each of which is divided into 2 parts, the first is always designated by a sequential number, and the second with the same number with the letter “a”, for example, the first chapter consists of the parts “1” and “1a”. At the same time, the first part of each chapter is a detailed description of one photograph from the childhood (less often youth) of the hero, and the second is a deeply intimate story about the life of a Belgrade citizen. While at the beginning of the novel the photographs rather carry the function of lyrical digressions, or pauses in the main narrative, later they cease to be only descriptions of the images. They become micro-stories, explaining and complementing the main plot line. The article presents an analysis of the change in the narrative model in the “photographic” chapters of the novel.