Embedded Naratives in Martin McDonagh’s Drama «the Pillowman»

When receiving the plays of the British-Irish playwright Martin McDonagh, the reader and viewer pays attention to the presence of episodes that go beyond the objective artistic reality of the characters. Thus, in the play “The Pillowman”, published in 2003, two spaces are clearly distinguished: the world in which the main events unfold (the writer ends up in a police station and is accused of a series of murders) and the fictional space of the writer’s seven stories, or embedded narratives. It is important to note that the boundaries between the two worlds are moving, since the characters actively move between them, resulting in the formation of additional space, which fragmentarily appears before the reader or viewer of the play. Despite the attention of domestic and foreign scientists to the work of Martin McDonagh, many aspects of his dramaturgy remain poorly studied, including the poetics of embedded narratives in the play “The Pillowman,” the understanding of which is the purpose of this article. Embedded narratives, being in synthesis with the main outline of the narrative, play an important role in shaping the plot and the reception of the work by the reader. The author of the article discovers two narrative levels, one of which includes the main storyline, and the other – embedded narratives, stories of the writer Katurian. In the course of analyzing the embedded narratives in the play “The Pillowman,” the author comes to the conclusion that, in the terminology of J. Genette, they are hetero and homodiegetic, and their main function is to amplify the plot, as well as to loosen the boundaries between real and fictional spaces in drama.