Author’s modality in Bernhard Schlink’s novel Homecoming

The article investigates Bernhard Schlink’s novel Homecoming within the context of the functional-semantic category of author’s modality, which has been relatively recently “discovered” by Russian philologists. Research of this category using various works of fiction enables scholars to draw objective conclusions on the artistic pictures of the world of various authors, as well as on their stances and viewpoints expressed in their works in order to be conveyed to the reader. The relevance of this research is determined by the combination of the anthropocentric and interdisciplinary approaches to studying a particular work of fiction whose author highlights the problem of an individual’s perplexity in the modern world and brings up the topic of the reassessment of eternal values in the rapidly developing age of metamodernism. Through the level-by-level analysis of the category of author’s modality the study revealed all the necessary verbal, structural and informal components of the text in order to detect the author’s intention towards a range of meaning-forming concepts. A thorough examination of the text of the novel Homecoming and its selective commenting led to the conclusion that Schlink takes an unambiguous position regarding the importance of saving the immutable social values in the modern world and impossibility of their deconstruction without the following moral degradation of an individual.