The concept of the "unspoken" border is steeped in ambiguity, and any clear sense of its nature, function and effect seems dark at first. However, these imperceptible boundaries still exert a strong restrictive hold on both the protagonist and the narrative in Bohumil Hrabal's novel I Served the King of England and in Camilo Jose Cela's text The Family of Pascual Duarte. In my analysis of Hrabal's novel, I hope to explain both the function and effect of these ghostly boundaries on the antihero Ditie, as he attempts to transgress both national and social boundaries. Next, in an attempt to theorize the nature and extent of these invisible boundaries in Pascual Duarte, I will focus my analysis on the novel's paratext; by this I mean the series of narrative fragments that frame Pascual's confession. In his novel, Hrabal describes various silent barriers that work in concert to restrain his shy protagonist, Ditie; in contrast, Cela presents a dense matrix of liminal boundaries that threaten both destruction and collapse upon the larger narrative. Both texts, however, can be seen as tormented and confined by the abundance of these “unspoken” boundaries. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Ditie initially seems able to transcend the visible boundaries of national difference, being on a strictly material level accepted by the Germans currently occupying his home country. He notes that none other than "the Office for the Defense of German Honor and Blood could find no objection to my marriage to an Aryan of German blood"1, and this double evocation of "blood" reflects these reasons purely biological on which Ditie is reluctantly accepted in the Reich. This sense of acceptance also extends to his denial of the Czech name “Dite, meaning child” (Hrabal, p. 135). Shunning the infantile nature of the "child," Ditie triumphantly states that "Now I was Herr Ditie, and to the Germans there was no child in my name" (Hrabal, p. 135). This bestowal of the German honorific “Herr” appears to officially name Ditie a German subject, suggesting that the boundary of nationality has truly been crossed. However, Hrabal punctures this optimism by confining Ditie within an unspoken boundary of racial prejudice. After his marriage to Liza, Ditie notes "that they tolerated me as Aryan but still considered me a stupid bohemian despite my bright yellow hair" (Hrabal, p. 143). Despite meeting the superficial requirements of the Master Race, namely "bright yellow hair" and the aforementioned "German blood", Ditie cannot cross this invisible barrier; he remains "a stupid bohemian". Later, Hrabal expresses this even more crudely when Ditie states, “I have become an alien” (Hrabal, p. 144). This self-classification as “alien” is the ultimate estrangement from his supposedly new compatriots; Ditie's attempt to cross the unspoken boundaries of racial prejudice is portrayed as an attempt that leads only to complete social alienation. The critic and cultural theorist Raymond Williams interprets alienation in his “Keywords” as a “broad feeling of division between man and society”2. Hrabal echoes this sense of the word through his depiction of an unexpressed, but rigidly controlled, "division" between Ditie and the Third Reich apparatus. Ditie, throughout I Served the King of England, also appears to effectively transgress visible social class boundaries. Its upward mobility is explicitly the result of war crimes, i.esay the theft and sale of Jewish property; nevertheless Ditie brazenly declares: "Now I was big, I was a millionaire" (Hrabal, p. 183). He boasts of his wealth, "talking openly about my million crowns and my hotel in the quarry" (Hrabal, p. 194) to his fellow millionaires in the seminary. However, despite owning this "Hotel in the Quarry", therefore meeting the requirements to join the prestigious Hoteliers' Association, Ditie complains that «those hoteliers could still make me feel humiliated, because I was not one of them, I was not of equal rank» (Hrabal , page 182). The reason for this lack of “equal rank,” this reduction to lower levels of the social hierarchy despite material wealth, is revealed by Hrabal as another invisible boundary; in this case, one that once again limits Ditie in overcoming her alienation from larger society. The nature of this boundary is revealed when Ditie describes his fellow millionaires as having "got their millions long ago, long before the war, while I was a war profiteer" (Hrabal, p. 194). This conception of Ditie as a newcomer, a nouveau riche, means that he can never truly join the established bourgeois elite, represented in the novel by the hoteliers Brandejs and Sroubek. Hrabal, therefore, describes the final, impassable and unspoken boundary in his novel as consisting of systematic class prejudice. Pascual Duarte's Family is also confined by its own unspoken boundary, in this case a multiplicity of imaginary paratexts; Cela uses notes, letters and dedications to surround and enclose the main text of the novel, casting doubt on its veracity and destabilizing its foundations. The novel's first paratext is a "Transcriber's Preliminary Note,"3 detailing the sorting and censoring of Pascual's manuscript under the aegis of a mysterious and anonymous "Transcriber." The adjective «Preliminary» underlines the primacy of these paratexts compared to the main text of the novel; Cela subverts any notion of textual purity from the start, trapping Pascual's confessions within nebulous confines of censorship and outside influence. This censorship is evident when the Transcriber notes that «Some passages, which were too rough, I preferred to eliminate rather than rewrite» (Cela, page 4). Furthermore, Pascual himself practices self-censorship in his letter to Don Joaquin, emphasizing that "There were some things that would have made me vomit in my soul to tell them, and I preferred to remain silent and try to forget them" (Cela, pg 6). With this elimination of aspects deemed "too crude", Cela clarifies that this double censorship is of a moralizing nature. Therefore, traditional morality can be read as another system of invisible boundaries that prevent Pascual from truly communicating with his readers, fictional and otherwise. Critics Bennett and Royle, in their chapter on literary openings, note that the deployment of paratexts can help a text shift its beginning4; in Pascual Duarte, Cela not only shifts the "true" beginning of his novel, but also actively undermines it. Other paratexts, the unspoken boundaries to the diegetic world of Pascual's manuscript, threaten the destruction of the narrative before it even begins. An extract from the will of Don Joaquin, the first recipient of Pascual's manuscript, expresses the desire that the text be "delivered to the flames" (Cela, page 9), and Pascual himself in his letter speaks of "throwing it into the flames" of fire in a moment of discouragement" (Cela, page 5). This double evocation of a purifying "fire" defines the text as a cursed and taboo object with a destabilizing effect on its (imaginary) readers. This method of text destruction isparticularly violent when compared to the careful censorship mentioned above; yet these three paratexts (transcriber's note, Pascual's letter, and Don Joaquin's will) all contribute to painting the impending narrative as simultaneously cursed and immoral, dooming the text before it is even presented to the reader. This paratextual preconception of Pascual as "not a model to be imitated, but to be avoided" (Cela, p. 4) acts as another tacit boundary, as it confines Pascual's attempt to portray himself as morally good within his own confession; a propensity found in his opening speech to the reader, where he declares: "I am not, sir, a bad person, even if in truth I do not lack reasons for being one" (Cela, page 13). Jacques Derrida, in “On grammatology ”, declares that «there is no external text»5. Cela reflects this by ensuring that the "external" frame of his novel, the paratexts, curb Pascual's attempts at a complete confession, and therefore any possibility of extricating himself "from the mud". of crime and sin" (Cela, page 150). The final paratext presented by Cela is the most limiting for any notion of narrative coherence within Pascual Duarte. Pascual dedicates his manuscript «To the memory of the illustrious patrician Don Jesus... who, when the author of this chronicle came to kill him, called him Pascualillo, and smiled" (Cela, page 11). attention towards an unexpressed hole within the actual novel, completely fragmenting any sense of textual unity. This hole in the diegetic world causes a narrative collapse, latent until the end of the novel; it is this collapse that induces the novel's abrupt end in the middle of the sentence: "I could breathe..." (Cela, page 158). The effects of this plunge into incoherence are noted by the transcriber, who observes that "we know nothing, absolutely nothing, about Pascual Duarte in his later era" (Cela, page 160). The double negative “nothing, absolutely nothing” reinforces this sense of narrative emptiness, a gap perceptible only to the reader through clues within the novel's paratext. It is possible to read this hole in the narrative as Cela avoiding the dangerous topic of the Spanish Civil War, for fear of political retaliation; in this reading, the reference to revolutionary violence in the assassination of the “distinguished patrician” in the paratext is particularly subversive. Therefore, it is possible to interpret the Civil War as the last unspoken boundary holding back the scope of Pascual Duarte's narrative, a taboo event that can only be hinted at indirectly in the novel's paratext. Both I Served the King of England and The Family of Pascual Duarte present a series of unspoken taboo boundaries that restrain and confine their respective narratives. Hrabal describes his protagonist, Ditie, as continually frustrated in his crossing of visible social boundaries by the invisible and presumed boundaries of racial and class prejudice. These borders limit Ditie in order to effect complete social alienation, an estrangement that culminates in Ditie's exile to the Czech borderlands. Likewise, Cela uses an extensive system of fictional paratexts to limit and control his text's ability to present the reader with a coherent and uncompromising narrative. However, Hrabal's use of unspoken boundaries differs markedly from Cela's; in his novel they are presented as visible obstacles within the main narrative and are clearly evident to the reader within it. They are "unspoken" only in that they represent the hidden prejudices that hinder Ditie's every attempt to truly transcend her nationality and class. 158.