The analysis is divided into four chapters as follows: how to read the unnatural in a narrative, what constitutes an unnatural space, the respective narrator’s voice, and finally, reliability of the narrators within their unnatural space. By using a combination of the fairly recent sub-discipline within narratology, unnatural narrative theory, and Genette’s question of “who speaks?”, this study analyses the narrators and the different kinds of unnatural spaces in which they speak. This paper compares the unnatural aspects of Gulliver’s Travels and select City Watch instalments of Discworld. The narratives foreground the fantastic, written to entertain and amuse its readers but also contain societal criticism in the form of satire or parody. Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels set in Ankh-Morpork are similar enough that both can be treated as belonging to the subgenre of comic fantasy. Although we argue that Pratchett’s use of humour is tendentious, that is, it is humour with a purpose, we argue that, contrary to the popular perception, it is actually the absurd that seems more central to Pratchett’s comedy rather than the satiric, and this is because it best serves the subversive desire in Pratchett to question over and over again what is postulated as self-evident, to disturb people’s mental habits to dissipate what is familiar and accepted, to re-examine rules and institutions. The paper argues that reversal is the key technique employed by Pratchett, and that this technique that is employed in each of the three modes of comedy found in the text, satire, mockage and the absurd.
Using, in broad terms, the theories of humour offered by Sigmund Freud (1905, 1928) and Ted Cohen (1990), I consider the comic techniques, the modes of the comedy, and the pragmatic effects of the comedy in the text as a whole. Pratchett is often described as a ‘satirist’, but this in turn raises the interesting questions of what it actually means to be a satirist in the Fantasy genre, and of whether ‘satire’ is actually an appropriate term for the approach Pratchett takes. This paper examines the effects of the comedy in Terry Pratchett’s vampire thriller, Carpe Jugulum (1998).
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