John Fowles and ‘The Magic Web of Storytelling’

The strategies that Fowles conceives to construct his textual worlds represent the most complex side of his highly original work which moulds the old humanist values of the traditional novel into new, more experimental forms. The present article places the focus of analysis on one of these strategies, namely the technique of the embedded narratives or concentric frames, used by Fowles to foreground the thin, fluid frontier between reality and fiction, as well as the existence of a plurality of worlds within the text. The writer constructs his narrative structures on several diegetic levels and he multiplies the number of stories and narrators by a continuous game in which he plays different roles and hides behind different masks.