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Narrative Description In Marco Polo's Travels: A Nonfictional Application Of Bakhtin's Chronotope, Ute Margarete Saine

Quidditas

Throughout the text of Marco Polo's Devisement du monde, the reader is repeatedly enjoined to believe the narration. Such a captatio benevolantiae – the rhetorical convention inviting reader interest – typically takes the form of assertions, such as "I am telling nothing but the truth"; "Everybody ought too believe this"; "This is how it was"; "This is how Marco Polo saw it," and the like. The narrator even proposes to uphold the sophisticated distinction between eyewitness information, gathered firsthand, and accounts obtained from others:

We will set down things seen as seen, things heard as heard, so that our …