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Abstract:

The article examines the role of narrator’s comments as an important compositional and structural component of modern novels that allows creating multidimensional narrative structures. The American novel The House of Leaves by Mark Danilevsky is classified as an example of ergodic literature, focused on playing interactively with the principles of communication. The author shows the role of comments in organizing a non-linear narrative, which turns the novel into an artistic analogue of a network or an hypertext, where the number of comments, references, and footnotes could never be finite. Thus, the classical task of the reader to get to the finale of the novel cannot be performed: the novel does not end but multiplies. The article discusses the question of how under such conditions the violation of the linearity of the text does not hinder, and sometimes even contributes to, the integrity of the narrative. The author’s intention is to create a novel that incorporates not only various fragments of style and genre, not only a multilevel system of narrations but also real research, history, architecture, photographs, drawings, references to music, films and real events, formulating them as comments, which turn out to be a ready-made form of “foreign word”. The reader is immersed in a hybrid of Internet sites with their system of hyperlinks and video games where the player must choose each next action as one of the possible probabilities. The ergodic novel turns out to be consonant with the modern consciousness, offering that form of work that modern discourse demands more than others.