A study of death narration in three war novels based on Genet’s theory

Despite the significance of contemplation in novel, most war novel writers have failed to deal with the philosophical aspect of death by overemphasizing the depiction of tragic scenes. Therefore, their novels are more of an event type. Most research works about war novels have studied them with an ideology-oriented approach and rarely attended to their philosophical aspects.  In this search, by using Gerard Genet’s narratology and a descriptive-analytic approach, the concept of death is examined in three war novels to understand how much war novels have been able to introduce the philosophical features of this phenomenon. As the results of this search show, the death event in these novels has repetitive frequency and is usually narrated with delay and details. The war narrators have put too much emphasis on heart-rending scenes of characters’ death so as to draw the attention of the audience to the oppression done to those characters. In other words, the emotional aspect of these novels speaks louder than their philosophical aspect. In the novel Chess with the Doomsday Machine, the writer deals with both the emotional and philosophical facets of the subject and places the major character in a struggle to choose between life and death. Therefore, as a pragmatic requirement of narration, it is necessary to notice the philosophical aspect of the narrated concepts.