The Tender Narrator In Guzel Yakhina’s Zuleikha

Abstract

The main assertion in this paper is that the tender narrator, whom the Polish writer, Olga Tokarczuk, made the subject of her Nobel Lecture, can convey the author’s perspective in such a way that all readers can find themselves in it. Using the example of Guzel Yakhina’s Zuleikha, the author of this paper demonstrates how tender narration brings out the titular character’s defenselessness as a quality of the human condition. The author ponders what distinguishes Yakhina’s novel among other examples of camp or historical literature and also addresses Hélène Cixous’s concept of l’écriture feminine, concluding that the perspective of tender narration is coextensive with the feminine narration that is open to voices arriving from a multitude of perspectives. The author also demonstrates that Yakhina’s Zuleikha is an example of literature that highlights and explores the experience of a human being’s internal freedom, which is inalienable, even though its external freedom may be endangered by fate, the laws of history or political machinations.