First Person Singular: Stories

In his collection of short stories First Person Singular, Haruki Murakami forms his narrative discourse through a first-person perspective; To put us inside the hero’s cognitive world, and what it includes of relative potential experiences that occur between dreams and reality within possible spatial references; Therefore, the hero experiences the event of communicating with a sage who tells him about an invisible multi-centered circle in a mountainous area which reinterprets his cosmic and existential state.

Additionally, he communicates with another dreamy voice of Charlie Parker and a new supplement melody as well. Also, he communicates with an intelligent monkey with a human voice who works in a marginal hotel, and listens to music in a dreamy and experimental atmosphere; It is as if the narrator refers us, in the implications of his discourse, to the renewed metaphorical similarity between reality and its dreamy and literary counterparts; That is why we find the hero talking about the intensity of the experience and its daily loudness, then the unreliability of its actual occurrence in all its details when spectra and voices fade away, or when they resemble music, or old spiritual archetypes within his consciousness, subconscious, and his cognitive methods of interpretation.

The narrator or the hero may open his journey by remembering music until he reaches the becoming and renewal of another internal music in a dream or in a possible space; I see that the hero's reading of novels and his listening to music contributed to the establishment of the spiritual journey towards the abstract circle and the voice of the wise in the mountain, marginal places, libraries, or casinos were the domains of transferences of sounds, signs, singular characters, and dream-slicing sounds in unconsciousness.

The narrator then analyzes this data through experimental happening that deconstructs the ends of experiences in the past; Charlie Parker's dream melody is in the process of being formed, and the identity of the smart monkey is renewed by the pictures of beautiful women, and their names in the dream. The hero himself is part of an old unknown tale that is being renewed in the consciousness and subconsciousness of the casino woman.

Also, he may find his other images included in the books of the poet who was writing to him; That is why we note that Murakami’s narrative discourse does not stop at the limits of past experiences in the hero’s memory, but rather renews their aesthetic impact in dreamy, metaphorical, dynamic, and transformative spaces.