Between Outside and Inside : A Chronotope Analysis of Magda Szabó’s Novel The Door

This thesis examines how the door functions as a chronotope in Magda Szabó’s novel The Door (Az ajtó, 1987). The study aims to deepen the understanding of the door’s role beyond its conventional interpretation as a literary symbol. This question is analyzed using a combined theoretical framework: Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the threshold chronotope and Joy Ladin’s subcategories, local chronotope and overlapping chronotope. The door as a chronotope and structural boundary leads to a diegetic gap between the narrator’s world of modern society and Emerence’s world of trauma. Furthermore, the door’s chronotopic function is the cause of the narrator’s betrayal, or, in Bakhtin’s term, a fall. This results in the collapse of Emerence’s self-created identity. The results contribute to scholarship by shifting the focus from the door as a symbol to a chronotope that governs the novel’s narrative development and themes.