This author, however, is dependent on a reader, who can bring the literary characters and objects to life so that they appear in his/her world.

Since the characters experience both worlds as “real,” the status of both is uncertain.įenoglio, the author of “Tintenherz,” is influential in that he can change both the storyline and the narrated world itself. The borders between the two narrated worlds can be crossed by characters from both worlds under certain circumstances. In the first part of my thesis I explain the “book-within-a-book”-motif that is the foundation of the Tintenwelt (the world that is created in “Tintenherz”) as well as of the blurring between reality and fiction. Tintenherz presents another concept of the character of the author (Fenoglio), which I examine in this thesis, based on both how other characters and Fenoglio view the author’s role in the novel. Fotis Jannidis goes even further by asserting that there are several functions that can be fulfilled by the author, by the text itself or by the reader. As Michel Foucault argues, however, the author has to be considered in the interpretation because he/she functions as the authority that forms the discourses contained in the text. The starting point of my analysis is Roland Barthes’ claim of the “Death of the Author” (1968), which conceives of the author as a “writerly” function that is only present in the creation of the text, rendering the author redundant for the analysis of the text. While this blurring of boundaries is evident in a number of instances throughout the text, it can best be seen in the figure of the intradiegetic author who has also written a novel called “Tintenherz.” This fictional author can interact with his literary figures and influence both the hypodiegetic and his own (intradiegetic) world by adding to the text even after it has been published, thereby challenging the distinction between both reality and fiction, the narrated world and the book itself. I argue that Tintenherz challenges traditional distinctions between reality and fiction, which are aimed at affecting the reader’s understanding of his/her reality. This thesis explores the tension between fiction and reality in Cornelia Funke’s novel Tintenherz (Inkheart), and the importance of the figure and the function of the author as an influential character of the perception of both.

Tintenherz by Cornelia Funke