Balzac y el relato corto fantásticoaproximación a la figura del narrador

Resumen

The fantastic vein of Balzac goes beyond incidental adherence to a literary trend which burst onto the scene in France in the 1830s and continued during that century, in coexistence with realism and naturalism. Balzac's work as a whole provides more than a social portrait. Even his more realist narratives are underlain by a certain visionary strain. The novel La Peau de Chagrin is regarded as the epitome of Balzac's fantastic fiction, but this author also dedicated himself to short narrative forms, due to their suitability for expressing the fantastic. The present paper focuses on the latter, which are less known and have been more rarely an object of inquiry. More specifically, this article analyses the function and the specific characteristics of the narrator in the fantastic text. This approach has made it possible to confirm that Balzac has a full mastery of the narratological technique that is inherent in the fantastic. This reinforces the view that Balzac qualifies not only as a father of realism but also as a pioneer of fantastic literature in France.