Fictive Narrativism and Multiperspectival Voice in Virginia Woolf’s A Haunted House: A Narratological Mapping of Speaker Ambiguity and Ghostly Focalization

Abstract

Virginia Woolf's short story "A Haunted House" (1921) is interpreted as a lyrical ghost story contemplating love, memory, and the endurance of the past; however, its arrangement of narrative voice and perspective has not been thoroughly analyzed within systematic narratological frameworks. This study examines narrative techniques of fictive narrativism through multiperspectival voice and ghostly focalization to blur distinctions between life and death, as well as between fact and fiction. By combining Genette's structural narratology with cognitive and unnatural narratology, the study uses a qualitative, text-based design that includes coding of narrative segments for voice type, focalizer, focalization, and ontological status. The analysis delineates four speaking positions: the living first-person narrator, the living couple's "we," the ghostly couple, and a blended or ambiguous "we." The intersection of these positions generates speaker ambiguity at thematic junctures. Internal focalization shifts between living, ghostly, and blended perceivers, with unclear parts coming together around the themes of "treasure," "safe," and shared emotional discovery. The alternation of natural and unnatural perspectives, facilitated by ambiguous segments, creates a “haunted” narrative texture in which readers navigate the boundary between realistic and spectral frames without achieving stabilization of their position. The research concludes that A Haunted House embodies haunting as a structural phenomenon in terms of voice and focalization, illustrating the efficacy of integrating structural, cognitive, and unnatural narratology for examining modernist fiction and supernatural literature, particularly in relation to ontological boundaries and interpretive instability.