Generating Sympathy for Specific Characters and Events in Mandla Langa’s “The Dead Men Who Lost Their Bones”

Abstract

In this article, I investigate Mandla Langa’s short story “The Dead Men Who Lost Their Bones” by applying Gérard Genette’s narrative discourse along with Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogic imagination to the text. By highlighting the way in which Langa employs narrational strategies to generate meaning in the story, I aim to correct the critical neglect of this aspect of his work. It is established that two narrational modes of the intradiegetic-homodiegetic and the intradiegetic-metadiegetic are employed by two central characters in the narrative. The first character narrator is Clementine, the daughter of the second narrator, Simeon Ngozi. This produces a heterodiegetic narrative, that is, a multiple narrative strategy. This multi-voiced polyphonic narrative accentuates the plight of the main characters and their struggles under oppressive and exploitative conditions in apartheid South Africa. It also generates sympathy for these events, as well as for Clementine and her father.