How does the role of the narrator influence a text's contents? Analyse the role of the narrator and his/her influence on the given work's interior meaning and subject matter.

            Though 20^th century postmodern ideals contend that it is the reader, not the author, who is tasked with assigning their own interpretation upon a given text, it is not always the author’s point of view that is conveyed within a text’s narration. One novel that utilises the subjectivity of its narrator to great effect is Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris, in which the reliability of the first-person narration of its protagonist, Kris Kelvin, is constantly under attack to reflect both the mental intrusion upon his mind within the context of the plot, as well as the novel’s philosophical undertones. In Solaris, Kris Kelvin is haunted by his perceived physical materialization of his dead wife on a spaceship after coming into contact with the titular sentient extraterrestrial ocean. What follows is an atmosphere of uncertainty and paranoia, as Kelvin struggles to distinguish reality from his own mental processes.

            The use of a first-person narrator in the novel is both a tool for Lem to convey Kelvin’s paranoia, as well as a vehicle for the novel’s philosophical questioning of the relationship between perception and reality. As the antagonist (the ocean) attacks Kelvin through his mind, it is essential that the reader is able to perceive Kelvin’s attempts to mentally process the oddities he experiences. Kelvin repeatedly attempts to justify his hallucinations as insanity (Lem, 49), preferring to believe that he is subjectively misinterpreting his reality rather than the thought of his reality no longer making sense to him. Furthermore, Kelvin himself addresses his own inability to distinguish perception from reality, stating ‘It was not possible to think except with one’s brain, no one could stand outside himself to check the functioning of his inner processes,’ (Lem, 51). As the conflict of Solaris occurs within the protagonist’s mind, the first-person narration serves to trap the reader into the character’s thought processes, disallowing them from attaining any sense of objective truth regarding his perceived hallucinations.