Så som bara den som bedragits kan älska : En narratologisk och semiosfärisk undersökning av Per Anders Fogelströms Mina Drömmars Stad

Sammanfattning: The aim of this essay, As only the deceived one can love, is to investigate the city character in the book Mina drömmars stad (City of dreams) by swedish author Per Anders Fogelström. I will do this by using narratology and making a narrative analysis of the city as a protagonist, with help from Jimmy Vulovic’s Narrativanalys (”narrative analysis”) and Claes Göran Holmberg’s & Anders Ohlssons Epikanalys – En introduktion (”epic analysis – an introduction”). All of these three theorists use the narratological tool-box of Gérard Genette, and I will use his tools in this essay as well. By doing this I will try to point out what this kind of personification of the city does to the story, and how it affects the readers point of view. One of the steps of the narrative analysis is to seek for information about the protagonist in its own environment, to see if there are any hidden clues about the identity of their character. In his book A universe of the mind – A semiotic theory of culture, Jurij M. Lotman writes about the semiosphere of the home, and how the ultimate place to seek for details about someone’s character is in someone’s home environment or surroundings. He demonstrates his thesis by analyzing the meaning of different homes in Michail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. Even if I try to read the city as a main character in City of dreams, it is inevitable that the city is also a stage, a scene and the environment where the story takes place. In the end of my analysis I will look to the environment of the city to try to draw conclusions about who this city of dreams really is.