Konsten att svälja sin läsare : En analys av August Strindbergs roman En dåres försvarstal

This essay analyses the act of reading August Strindberg’s novel En dåres försvarstal (A Madman’s defence). It reveals the writer’s motif and purpose with the text and it shows how a certain interpretation of the text is crucial for the writer’s intentions to become reality. But it also shows how this interpretation is threaten by several, both intertextual and extratextual, thematically and structural, factors. Those factors are logical effects of the writer’s motif and purpose and they inevitably creates an ambiguous narrative structure witch threatens to undermine, from the writers point of view, the optimal interpretation of the text. The essay also reveals several thematical and structural strategies that, in spite of the inevitable ambiguity, the writer make use of to prevent alternative interpretations and at the same time reinforce the one suited for its own needs. Furthermore, the essay comment some other writings about the novel in the vast field of Strindberg research. It shows that there is a tendency to analyse the ambiguity of the text as an effect of some kind of unconscious crisis. It deconstructs these different kinds of interpretations and shows that there is an alternative, completely logical, way of reading the novel that also suits its writers intentions, although that kind of reading is threaten by the inner logic of the narrative structure