Here the extraordinary embodiedness of the Neanderthal focalization is a key to a literary-allegorical reading of the Neanderthal mind as imagined by Golding. The parameters of cognitive and unnatural narratology may seem divergent at the outset, but in this essay their representatives find a common ground in an estranging reading of the enactive immersion in The Inheritors. Conversely, the same novel serves as an example for the unnaturalist of the paradoxical necessity for perceptual and emotional familiarization in our attempts to understand fundamental alterity. Ultimately, The Inheritors reminds the cognitivist of how language-bound the readerly effects of estrangement and integration in internal focalization can be. The two narratologists juxtapose their respective concepts and methodologies in an analysis of William Golding's late modernist classic The Inheritors, especially the narrative dynamics of "alien" Neanderthal focalization versus "naturalizing" Homo sapiens narration. This essay is a constructed dialogue between imaginary narratologists who are paradigmatic proponents of two schools of thought in postclassical narratology: the cognitive and the unnatural. Any new narratological theory faces the test of being applicable to much-analyzed classics of prose fiction and of yielding new insights into narratives that have served as textbook examples of narrative strategies for decades.
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