Women’s Wounds in the Narrative Voice of Eka Kurniawan’s Novel Cantik Itu Luka: A Narratological Analysis

Ni Luh Putu Hasti Sri Maharani Maharani (Program Studi Sastra Indonesia, Fakultas Ilmu Budaya, Universitas Udayana)

Litera Kultura
Vol. 14 No. 1 (2026): April

This study aims to examine the narrative voice in Eka Kurniawan’s novel Cantik Itu Luka through Gérard Genette’s narratological perspective, focusing on the aspects of time of narration, person, and narrative level. A descriptive qualitative method was employed, involving data collection through reading and annotating the novel’s text, as well as analysis based on the categories of voice in Genette’s theory. The results show the use of the four models of narrative time (subsequent, prior, simultaneous, interpolated) with a dominance of the past and present tenses, an omniscient heterodiegetic narrator, and an extradiegetic-heterodiegetic level with embedded stories. The narrative voice functions as an aesthetic strategy to represent the complexity of women’s experiences and social reality within the framework of magical realism for confronting the wounds experienced by the female characters.