Las voces del 'loco'. La representación ambigua de la conciencia en "Pido la muerte al rey", de Ramón Hernández

Sammanfattning: This study focuses on some of the mechanisms that can create readerly ambiguity in the representation of “consciousness” (in this context understood as “mental activity”) in Ramón Hernández’ novel Pido la muerte al rey, which revolves around the life of psychiatric patient Gontrán Zaldívar. One kind of ambiguity arises from the constant shift between the autodiegetic and the heterodiegetic narrators in the novel. The vocal alternation makes it challenging to discern who is speaking when homonymous verbal forms for both persons are employed. This is particularly relevant for Spanish, since the two forms for the imperfect past and conditional tense are identical. The use of techniques such as narrative present and impersonal verbal forms, as well as the polysemy of verbs of perception, can create ambiguities surrounding the interpretation of Gontrán’s inner and outer worlds. After our analysis, the narrative alternation in the novel suggests that both voices are brought into alignment, therefore giving the madman’s voice the same significance as the omniscient narrator’s. Furthermore, the stylistic transmission between the autodiegetic narrator’s grammatically erroneous language and the more standard language of the heterodiegetic narrator implies that the madman’s experience is in reality being privileged over the other voice in Hernández’ novel, conventionally considered as discursively hegemonic. The central claim of this study is that Pido la muerte al rey shows how the boundaries between first/third person voices and inner/outer worlds do not apply to the discourse of the madman, who eventually creates a new discourse with norms of its own.