The Language of Narrative in Magical Realist Novels

Most magical realist novelists enjoy a powerful imagination and sense of creativity. In order to create an atmosphere different from other literary genres, the writers of this type of novel try to modify the conventional narrative techniques of traditional realism. This transformation affects different levels of writing, ranging from setting to characterization and narrative language. These writers, therefore, have to develop special techniques at the level of language. They let defamiliarization into their novels, albeit in a new way. These novelists literalize both figures of speech and thought, and breathe a new life into old and hackneyed metaphors. They also upset the balance between the intensity of an incident and its language of narration. They usually make the common, everyday phenomena look fantastic or the other way around. This way of using language in magical realism helps the writers to flavour their texts with more magical, but at the same time concrete and ironic, imaginative pictures.