Several other such pieces came along, and eventually I realized they all had the same narrator.
Would the same narrator who belabors his penis ("The boot. The package. The wood. The johnson.
The events are recounted by the same narrator, but in four parts that each purport to show the point of view of a different character.
Now, he is working on a series of short stories, all set in Bulgaria and with the same narrator, that "fall into the interstices of the novel".
While studies have been made of different versions of a tale occurring within a tribe, there is still much to be discovered, for instance, in the telling of the same tale by the same narrator under different circumstances.
Hanzee's decision to turn on the Gerhardts, even stabbing Floyd in the chest, is not explained, though that same narrator gives a tantalisingly possible reason as to why he is so hellbent on killing Ed and Peggy.
The collection of stories I'm working on now is very much a companion to the novel: all of the stories are set in Bulgaria, all of them feature the same narrator.
"I guess real life is often unsightly," the same narrator remarks, "so they built a highway straight through the heart of the city to keep tourists away from what's real, away from the heart of us".
It comes 10 years after the same narrator, Neville Jason, produced an abridged version and, when approached to read the whole thing, exclaimed, "Oh my God, it's going to take the rest of my life!" A multitude of ordinary, educated readers have muttered the same thing and moved on with their lives, though with a sense of cultural failure.
