Unspoken Boundaries in "I Served the King of England" and "The Family of Pascual Duarte" Anonymous College

The concept of an `unspoken’ boundary is one drenched in ambiguity, with any clear sense of its nature, function and effect seeming initially obscure. However, these unnoticeable boundaries still exert a strong restrictive grip on both protagonist and narrative in Bohumil Hrabal’s novel I Served The King Of England and Camilo José Cela’s text The Family of Pascual Duarte. In my analysis of Hrabal’s novel, I hope to explicate both the function and effect of these spectral boundaries on the antihero Ditie, as he attempts to transgress both national and social borders. Next, in an attempt to theorise the nature and extent of these invisible boundaries in Pascual Duarte, I will focus my analysis on the novel’s paratext; by this I mean the series of narrative fragments that act as a frame for Pascual’s confession. In his novel, Hrabal depicts various silent barriers working in concert to hold back his timid protagonist, Ditie; conversely, Cela presents a dense matrix of liminal boundaries that threaten both destruction and collapse upon the wider narrative. Both texts, however, can be seen as haunted and confined by an abundance of these `unspoken’ boundaries.

Ditie initially seems able to traverse the visible boundaries of national...