ONE OF THE POSSIBLE VIEWS ON "THE HOUSE OF ITS OWN" BY IVO ANDRIĆ

Abstract

The last and posthumously published collection of Ivo Andrić’s short stories titled "The House on Its Own" in many features represents a specific narrative work of our Nobel laureate. Without claiming any sort of final judgment, as the scope of this paper and the complexity of this collection do not allow that, the paper has tried to provide some new insights into the direction which the future analysis could go to.

Bearing in mind relativism as one of the immanent properties of Andrić’s work, and the conception of this collection that has been designed so that the souls of the dead come to the writer asking him to take them into his work and to tell him their life story, we think that this work is especially suitable for the consideration of the presence of humor and the type of humor in it, as well as the presence of lately increasingly popular "theory of possible worlds."

First we give the most important concepts related to the "theory of possible worlds," referring primarily to the attitudes of Ljubomir Doležel, and then, analyzing examples from the stories we try to determine the type, degree of humor in this structure.

We conclude that the focus of the aforementioned stories shows the moment when the characters discover the possibility of the existence of their counterparts in other possible worlds. In the perception of the characters humor does not offer comfort in another world. Otherwise the souls of "The House on Its Own" would not need to come to the narrator, he inevitably returns us to this world as the only possible one, showing us that there is no alternative and what is more, the world of the story that coexists in the real world turns out to be the most "reality", because the story ultimately survives everything, and the life in the story remains as the only evidence of existence.