This thesis is the first scholarly effort to comprehensively analyze, systematize and summarize the concept of personal identity in the fiction of Miguel de Unamuno, Spain’s prominent writer («Peace in War», «Love and Pedagogy», «Mist», «Abel Sánchez», «Aunt Tula», «Saint Emmanuel the Good, Martyr»). The interest is predetermined by the paradigmatic nature of his works to increase understanding of the spiritual processes of the modern world in general, and to construct both collective and individual identity through the written word in particular. A thorough study of a large number of historical, literary and critical works dedicated to the personality and creativity of the researched writer ultimately led to determining the main stages of development of Unamunean studies and helped define the gap in the literary-critical scholarly field pertaining all novels of M. de Unamuno – namely the issues of personal identity. Thus, we have conducted a historical and literary study of reception of M. de Unamuno’s oeuvre in Ukraine. The research has also systematized and summarized critical literature dedicated to the issue of identity in humanitarian studies in general, and literary criticism in particular.
The research work focuses on the processes of self-identification of Unamuno’s characters through a community expressing a collective identity and serving as a stimulus and trigger for the creation of internal contradictions within individual characters resulting in a crisis of personal identity and an agonistic world perception. The latter is the main concept for Unamuno’s worldview, which is understood not as the last death throes, but as a struggle between two mutually exclusive elements. At the same time, the work does not study the notion of collective identity due to the fact that M. de Unamuno’s philosophical and fictional works were well-researched from this perspective by foreign and domestic researchers.
The author creates a variety of fictional situations that have great potential for understanding and interpreting personal identity. In his novels «Peace in War» and «Saint Emmanuel the Good, Martyr» it is important to specify the connections of personal and collective identity for the formation and building of the individual, that realizes itself in his/her assimilating to and complete absorbing by the community, or, vice versa, in his/her alienation/separation from the group. Thus, the writer highlights the importance of seeking internal peace through the obligatory presence of agony which assumes an indispensable background for identity construction. Unamuno’s novels concentrate on the identity crisis caused by blurred gender markers, where natural essence is confronted with stereotypical roles imposed by society on both sexes («Love and Pedagogy», «Mist» and «Aunt Tula»).
This dissertation investigates the novels of M. de Unamuno in terms of the strategy of preservation/blurring of identity, basic methods and techniques of memory which form the basis of individual personality, as well as the tradition of a collective personality. This process is disclosed in different ways throughout all novels, which provides the opportunity to trace how the processes of constructing, as well as preserving and representing personal identity take place through the issues of memory. The main ways have turned to be: the theory of the mnemonic actor, the active individual using memory as an instrument of his own self-affirmation; the techniques of oral and written identity fixation which involve methods of transferring individual memory via externalized memory media, temporal and spatial metaphors of memory.
The research pays special attention to the novel’s poetics as to artistically investigate the issue of personal identity. One of the focuses is on modelling identity via narrative, intertextuality, expressive means, silence and suppression, and spatial representations. The narrative in terms of organizing one’s knowledge about personal Ego has been distinguished, namely, where the theoretical construct of the author-narrator-character (according to Paul Rikoeur) is transformed into an interwoven mixture of reality and fiction. The effect of scattering the human Ego is related to the emergence of the polyphonic nature of the novel, which uses complex narrative models for revealing characters’ and author’s personalities. The ‘intertextuality’ concept in our research is treated as the strategy for constructing identities in the works of the Spanish classic writer under study, where the author-narrator and the characters consider their own ego projections as life patterns associated with certain literary characters, real writers and intellectuals representing the Spanish national tradition and representing other nations.
