The paper argues that narrative functions as a valuable resource for thought and also for developing human cognition and mental work. More specifically, the paper outlines an approach to studying narratives as basic cognitive tools for thinking, and thus my contribution will continue to explore several cognitive processes that allow readers to comprehend narrative texts.

Fauconnier and Turner (2002, pp. 389-396) provide an overview of how blending affects the course of a human life, and more specifically, how young children are engaged in building complex blends in very early stages of their lives. Their detailed analysis shows that only after the young child is able to master culturally recognized blends will s/he be effectively 'living in the blend' and prove capable of further achieving other blends with more flexibility.

Although the foundations of the Soviet concentration camp system date back to the Bolshevik Revolution and Russian Civil War, the amplitude of human suffering in the Gulag would not be known in detail until after 1962, i.e. the year when A. Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was published. But even before the start of World War II, the totalitarian Soviet universe spoke the language of oppression that public opinion in the West constantly refused to acknowledge. This paper tries to recover a neglected corpus of early autobiographical narratives depicting the absurd Soviet concentration system, in the authentic voice of a number of Gulag survivors (G. Kitchin, Tatiana Tchernavin, Vladimir Tchernavin, S. A. Malsagoff, etc.).

The paper examines a number of unrealized and unauthentic narrative events in Ernest Hemingway’s “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” which, despite not being part of the main story line, are still emotionally charged as well as thoroughly and instantly engaging. I argue that our involvement in such counterfactual scenarios might be explained by the fact that we don’t feel it to be necessary to choose between the multiple developments of the story. In connection with this, I formulate the question whether this emergent narrative diversity has an implicit effect on the act of reading. It seems that the introduction of the counterfactual stories heightens the immersion effect of the story.

In Edward Hopper’s disquietingly familiar realist paintings, isolated individuals experience the urban drama of everyday life in the early decades of the twentieth century. Paintings such as Sunday, Automat, Drug Store, Chop Suey, Nighthawks, and Summer Evening are populated by enigmatic and anonymous figures inhabiting equally anonymous locations. Despite Hopper’s preference for the visual medium to express the fragmented times of modernity, his paintings provide analogies to Hemingway’s unsentimental short stories of the 1920s. Underlying both Hopper’s paintings and Hemingway’s stories, however, is a common story of human disjointedness that is their artistic response to a modern fragmented society and culture. Hemingway’s short stories “Cat in the Rain,”“The Killers,”and “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” among many others, depict an equally alienating landscape of isolation and loneliness, reflecting the uncertainties of the historical times. Finally, my article will examine the disrupted narrative subtexts in a series of visual works by Hopper and short stories by Hemingway. I argue that their broken narratives create an unvoiced paradox: there is an openness to interpretation, despite the structural and formal disruptions present in these two artistic media.