THE THING AS NARRATOR: THE MATERIAL WORLD AS AN EPISTEMOLOGICAL INSTANCE IN K. BAIZHARASOVA’S NOVEL «WAITING FOR KAIROS»

Abstract

Kemen Baizharasova's novel Waiting for Kairos represents a distinctive case of narrative architecture in which narrator unreliability is caused not by moral or cognitive limitations, but by the clinical dissociation of the protagonist's consciousness. Dissociative fugue generates two autonomous narrative streams – the diary of the psychiatrist Indira and the blog of the alter ego @Asya_Tesey – each with only partial access to reality, while both voices remain internally coherent and convincing. Under conditions of total unreliability of both human narrators, the material world assumes the function of the only epistemologically reliable witness. The study introduces the concept of clinically motivated unreliability as a new type not covered by existing rhetorical and cognitive classifications, and proposes focalization through the object – a narrative mode in which the thing acts as a passive but privileged registrar of events.