Conflicting Testimonies: Dialogic Oppositions in Japrisot's Suspense Novels

Studying Japrisot’s novels from the mid-1960s to the 1980s, this chapter will examine the mechanisms of suspense at work in each. At the heart of each work lies a dual narrative construction: that concerning a crime located in the past and that concerning the future of the novel’s characters. This chapter identifies a further source of tension, however: that generated by the opposition of competing narratives concerning the original crime. Within this narrative competition there lies an attempt by individual protagonists to attribute key roles within the crime, to name the criminal and, quite often, the victim, but also to assign such labels and to define and to contain the source of other narrative voices within the novel. As such, it will argue, Japrisot’s novels of the period must be read as narrative battles where the protagonists’ very sense of self is at stake.