TIME OF CRISES

Text topic: Crisis of Narrative

Text author: Ирена Ђукић

This paper analyzes a specific relationship between ideology as an anti-historical category and the narratives underlying the novel The Time of Miracles by Borislav Pekić. It highlights the key features of immutable and always the same ideological mechanisms, regardless of the contents of ideas in whose name they act. Among many ideological tools, there is narration as a primary means to produce an ideological system as an instrument of action based on the perception of community. However, narrative techniques also represent the only means that enables freedom. By forgetting about the symbiosis of ideology and narrative, the Serbian literary scene is at a narrative crisis due to its sterile wandering through the text. The solution out of the crisis is not in ignoring the ideological nature of storytelling, but in finding the right distance between the complex reality that surrounds us and the ideas that guide us.