1 Introduction

This section introduces the French writer Romain Gary and his pseudonym Émile Ajar's literary career and works. Gary's *Gros-Câlin*, published under the name Ajar, is a quintessential example of the "Ajar style." Through the perspective of the protagonist Cousin, the novel recounts his life with a python in Paris and his transformation into a python. The story focuses on the protagonist's inner world, subtly addressing real-world issues while showcasing the acute perception of the world by someone with autism. Ajar's narrative strategies include first-person narration, metanarration, lexical deformation, and grammatical misuse, creating a sense of estrangement and completing the metamorphosis from Gary to Ajar. The narrative techniques in *Gros-Câlin* are the origin of the "Ajar style," and studying them helps in understanding its overarching characteristics.

2 The Dialogic Nature of the Text

This section explores the application of Mikhail Bakhtin's dialogic theory in Romain Gary's *Gros-Câlin*. Bakhtin posits that the interaction of multiple voices, perspectives, and ideologies within a text enhances its dialogic quality, which extends not only within the text but also to the exchange between the text and the reader. *Gros-Câlin* exhibits strong dialogism through the interaction between the first-person narrator Cousin and the reader. By using the present indicative tense, Cousin places the narrator and the reader in the same temporal frame, making the act of narration part of the story. He speaks directly to the reader, positioning the narrator and the reader in the same space, transforming the reading process into face-to-face communication. Cousin also emphasizes certain narrative elements to strengthen engagement with the extratextual reader, bridging the distance between them. Additionally, Cousin introduces the irreversibility of language into the text, simulating the immediacy of dialogue and bringing the written word closer to spoken discourse. Through these techniques, Gary intensifies the novel's dialogic nature, turning the text from a mere display of story into a process of utterance, achieving interaction between the narrator and the reader.

3 The Self-Referentiality of Metanarration

This section examines the use of metanarration in Romain Gary's *Gros-Câlin*, particularly its self-referential quality. Metanarration breaks the closed framework of traditional novels by leveraging the dual temporality of story and narration, distinguishing between the world of telling and the world being told. Cousin's first-person narration spans both the internal and external dimensions of the story structure, with self-referential metanarration manifesting in two forms: "anaphora" (forward reference) and "cataphora" (backward reference). Anaphora presents the narrative process before the story, while cataphora consists of post-narrative commentary that reconstructs the story, interrupts the linear flow of the text, and exhibits strong reflexivity. In *Gros-Câlin*, metanarration not only mends fragmented contexts but also serves as a means for the narrator to convey extratextual information to the reader. The cataphoric mode of metanarration, through backtracking-overwriting-reconstructing, influences or even subverts earlier content, reflecting the author's attitude. This molting-like division categorizes the text into "story" and "story of the story," offering new interpretive angles. Cousin's "act first, think later" approach allows him to examine himself from an external position, dissolving the subjectivity of the "I." The narrator Cousin becomes a generative rather than conclusive "being" through self-reference, achieving escape and transcendence of the self via higher-order reflection and reevaluation. Ultimately, the metanarration in *Gros-Câlin* points to the intense self-awareness embodied in the act of narration, escaping and transcending the self at a higher level. This highly self-reflexive, alienating mindset is central to Gary's focus and a key feature of the "Ajar style."

4 Linguistic Deformation and Escape

This section delves into the linguistic manifestations of the "Ajar style" narrative strategy in Romain Gary's *Gros-Câlin*. Cousin rejects traditional pragmatic rules, excavates the communicative properties of language, creates new vocabulary, and misuses existing words to enhance lexical mystery, delay semantic fixation, and replace traditional logical deduction with free association and multidirectional meaning transitions. He deliberately distorts and fractures grammatical rules, liberating language's expressive function and providing space for semantic divergence. Cousin's narration also features unconscious errors, shaping a chaotic linguistic environment that aligns with his unique thought patterns. Ajar's linguistic deformation serves as an escape from modern pragmatic rules, viewing standardized language as a homogenizing instrument of violence that masks differences and enslaves thought. Cousin's idiosyncratic language becomes his path of escape, preserving lexical estrangement and semantic possibility. The novel's imagery of parroting reveals the repetitive and limited nature of standardized language, while the python's molting symbolizes escape from external constraints and the rediscovery of an inner authentic self. Ajar's obsession with escape stems from the media's fixation on Gary's personal image; he resists reader capture through linguistic ambiguity, providing an escape route for both Cousin and Gary. In the "Ajar style," the rejection of traditional terminology outlines an escape route from the linguistic system. Cousin's re-encoding of vocabulary and deviation from grammatical rules break constraints, liberate language's communicative function, and create a new narrative-reading system that pushes language toward infinity, intensifying the novel's tension.

5 Conclusion

*Gros-Câlin*, as the opening act of the "Ajar adventure," underwent over twenty rewrites by Romain Gary, reflecting the author's exploration and escape from the self. The novel resists linguistic homogenization through colloquial errors, constructing a concentric three-tier framework of text, narration, and language. The "Ajar style" escape is not a simple inward or outward breakthrough but a gradual opening of gaps from the outside in: first-person dialogue destabilizes the text's structure, self-referential metanarration destabilizes narrative stability, and linguistic deformation achieves true escape. *Gros-Câlin* extends the desire for escape across multiple dimensions, serving not only as a creative experiment in the "Ajar style" but also as Gary's exploration of the diversity of literary expression.