NARRATIVE AUTHORITY AND FEMALE VOICE IN “LOST GENERATION” PROSE: HEMINGWAY’S “A FAREWELL TO ARMS” AND FITZGERALD’S “THE GREAT GATSBY”

Abstract

The article examines the female characters of E. Hemingway’s “A Farewell to Arms” and F. S. Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” not as portraits but as narrative positions. Combining narratological analysis with quantitative indicators of presence, voice and dialogue attribution, the study shows that textual prominence and narrative authority are independent variables. The heroine may saturate the text yet be denied focalization entirely. The category of presence without focalization is proposed. Deprived of narrative competence, the heroine is nonetheless assigned a corrective function. She names the performative nature of the gender relation and refutes the narrator’s claim to honesty. This function is identified as the principal repository of the social experience preserved beneath the stereotype. The study also demonstrates that narrative authority is not equivalent to the amount of speech assigned to a female character. Although Catherine Barkley and Daisy Buchanan participate actively in dialogue, their speech remains structurally dependent on male narration, which determines its context, interpretation, and significance. At the same time, their limited verbal interventions create moments of resistance to the dominant narrative perspective. These moments reveal the tension between female experience and its male mediation and suggest that the heroines’ narrative marginalization itself becomes a meaningful form of textual representation. By combining narratological categories with quantitative textual evidence, the article offers a more precise way of examining gender asymmetry in modernist fiction and extends gynocritical analysis from the question of female representation to the question of who possesses the authority to represent.