Synopsis The aim of the thesis is to analyse the category of the narrator in a detective story. This category can be considered firstly as an independent textual element and secondly in its connection to the plotline. In the structure of detective stories, apart from fabula and sujet, we can discern two mutually influential plotlines. One of them is the story of the crime (past), the other is the story of the reconstruction (investigation of the crime). The way they approach each other on different levels (the setting, characters) helps us to understand the structure of the whole story. The reader can actualize the narrative also thanks to the mediator, the mediator between the text and the reader being the narrator. In the detective story Distant Star the narrator is unreliable, which expresses itself in different ways. The unreliability is supported by the fact that it is a subjectivized narration of a character who can be identified as the narrator. 'The narrator - character' does not have a single focalization in this story. He comments (e.g. by use of brackets) upon his previous stands. The point of view of the narration changes along with the character. 'The narrator - character' can at the same time be considered as the author's alter ego. We may encounter the author himself thematized in the text...

This thesis focuses on the notion of unreliability of a narrator. From the theoretical point of view, it challenges the category of unreliable narratorsas too broad and vague. It attempts to problematize the idea of a distinctive border line separating reliable and unreliable narrators via practical interpretative analysis of prototypes of narrators. Based on such analyses it claims that many of these narrators have been included in this category unjustifiably. Thus the category suffers from its expansive character and blurred meaning. The thesis perceives recognition of narrators based on binary opposition of reliable vs. unreliableas problematic; therefore the thesis also provides potential ways how to approach individual samples of narratives and their narrators. The thesis attempts to reduce growing the number of potential unreliable narrators via using other frames to describe their narrative functions.

This essay identifies a type of narrative dissonance in the depictions of working-class conditions within Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life and George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London. In this thesis, the dissonance is argued in part to be the effect created when an author belonging to one social class attempts to portray a class separate from their own. According to Marxist views, class constructs are well-defined and exist in opposition to one another. As such, there is a distinction between describing circumstances while viewing from outside and portraying conditions from within a class consciousness one does not share. The contrast between these perspectives introduces a discordant element into the narrative which interferes with a reader’s immersion. Furthermore, instances of both intranarrational and extratextual unreliability exacerbate the peculiar sense of dissonance when those elements conflict with the experiences of the reader. Understanding and sympathizing with the experiences of the Other, while beneficial in many regards, should not be conflated with knowledge of their lived experience. In order to establish this distinction, a close reading of the books, highlighting examples, is utilized. Additionally, by way of further explanation, Althusser’s concept of “internal distantiation” is used to define conflicting class viewpoints as a contributing factor to the dissonance perceived.

The so-called Second Czechoslovak Republic (1938-1939) is used to be portrayed as the dark age, when obscure, fascist elements came to lights. This period is ussually put in opposition to the previous First Czechoslovak Republic (1918-1938). In this thesis the main argument consist of questioning the continuity between these two allegedly contradictory historical times through the analysis of special legislation - state of exception -, which was adopted in purpose to deal with defending the democracy in Czechoslovakia between 1933 and 1938. The State Protection Act (1936) implemented into legal discourse special term for potential - in the case of war - enemies of the state: "state unreliable persons". This category of "reliability" was understood as nationality and part of far more complex national consensus by all contemporary agents, which legitimizes the state intervention primarily into the economic sphere. In the centre of national consensus stood transformed labour: collective duty for the nation. Until 1938, among contemporary agents, exists strong notion that realization the state of exception in the case of war and therefore national consensus cannot be fully realized because of international minority laws. But during the Second Republic (1938-1939) different agents used language of...

This study aimed to identify the differences between state-of-the-art VPN solutions on different operating systems. It was done because a novel VPN protocol is in the early stages of release and a comparison of it, to other current VPN solutions is interesting. It is interesting because current VPN solutions are well established and have existed for a while and the new protocol stirs the pot in the VPN field. Therefore a contemporary comparison between them could aid system administrators when choosing which VPN to implement. To choose the right VPN solution for the occasion could increase performance for the users and save costs for organizations who wish to deploy VPNs. With the remote workforce increasing issues of network reliability also increases, due to wireless connections and networks beyond the control of companies. This demands an answer to the question how do VPN solutions differ in performance with stable and unstable networks? This work attempted to answer this question. This study is generally concerning VPN performance but mainly how the specific solutions perform under unreliable network conditions.It was achieved by researching past comparisons of VPN solutions to identify what metrics to analyze and which VPN solutions have been recommended. Then a test bed was created in a lab network to control the network when testing, so the different VPN implementations and operating systems have the same premise. To establish baseline results, performance testing was done on the network without VPNs, then the VPNs were tested under reliable network conditions and then with unreliable network conditions. The results of that were compared and analyzed. The results show a difference in the performance of the different VPNs, also there is a difference on what operating system is used and there are also differences between the VPNs with the unreliability aspects switched on. The novel VPN protocol looks promising as it has overall good results, but it is not conclusive as the current VPN solutions can be configured based on what operating system and settings are chosen. With this set-up, VPNs on Linux performed much better under unreliable network conditions when compared to setups using other operating systems. The outcome of this work is that there is a possibility that the novel VPN protocol is performing better and that certain combinations of VPN implementation and OS are better performing than others when using the default configuration. This works also pointed out how to improve the testing and what aspects to consider when comparing VPN implementations.

The thesis introduces the Mahābhārata as a complex literary text - a multi-genre text and a polyphonic interpretation of a factual discourse with several competing narratives - and uses the findings and techniques of narratology, especially of rhetorical narratology, to interpret it. In the thesis, I argue that when analysing the seeming inconsistencies of this text, it is not necessary to look for the explanation on the "outside" (various unconnected authors) but that it is possible to explain them also from the "inside" of the text, using the differences in genres, as well as the knowledge, goals and subjectivity of the individual characters and narrators. These resources are often used in the communication with the audience (readers/listeners). The concrete material for this argument is the story of Ambā, Śikhaṇḍinī a Śikhaṇḍin and the way in which are the facts concerning this triune character presented, especially by Bhīṣma who claims their narrative most importantly by narrating Ambopākhyāna, an analeptic episode explaining Śikhaṇḍin's life story and his involvement in the Kurukṣetra battle: narration with a distinctive authoritativeness and subjectivity, but a doubtable narratorial reliability. I show how Bhīṣma defines Śikhaṇḍin as a woman using this episode, and thus makes him into one of...

In this thesis, we study three supply chain planning problems. The first two problems fall in the tactical planning level, while the third one falls in the strategic/tactical level. We present a direct application for the first two planning problems in the wind turbines industry. For the third problem, we show how it can be applied to supply chains in the food industry. Many countries and localities have the explicitly stated goal of increasing the fraction of their electrical power that is generated by wind turbines. This has led to a rapid growth in the manufacturing and installation of wind turbines. The globally installed capacity for the manufacturing of different components of the wind turbine is nearly fully utilized. Because of the large penalties for missing delivery deadlines for wind turbines, the effective planning of its supply chain has a significant impact on the profitability of the turbine manufacturers. Motivated by the planning challenges faced by one of the world’s largest manufacturers of wind turbines, we present a comprehensive tactical supply chain planning model for manufacturing of wind turbines in the first part of this thesis. The model is multi-period, multi-echelon, and multi-commodity. Furthermore, the model explicitly incorporates backorder penalties with a general cost structure, i.e., the cost structure does not have to be linear in function of the backorder delay. To the best of our knowledge, modeling-based supply chain planning has not been applied to wind turbines, nor has a model with all the above mentioned features been described in the literature. Based on real-world data, we present numerical results that show the significant impact of the capability to model backorder penalties with general cost structures on the overall cost of supply chains for wind turbines. With today’s rapidly changing global market place, it is essential to model uncertainty in supply chain planning. In the second part of this thesis, we develop a two-stage stochastic programming model for the comprehensive tactical planning of supply chains under supply uncertainty. In the first stage, procurement decisions are made while in the second stage, production, inventory, and delivery decisions are made. The considered supply uncertainty combines supplier random yields and stochastic lead times, and is thus the most general form of such uncertainty to date. We apply our model to the same wind turbines supply chain. We illustrate theoretical and numerical results that show the impact of supplier uncertainty/unreliability on the optimal procurement decisions. We also quantify the value of modeling uncertainty versus deterministic planning. Supplier selection with quantity discounts has been an active research problem in the operations research community. In this the last part of this thesis, we focus on a new quantity discounts scheme offered by suppliers in some industries. Suppliers are selected for a strategic planning period (e.g., 5 years). Fixed costs associated with suppliers’ selection are paid. Orders are placed monthly from any of the chosen suppliers, but the quantity discounts are based on the aggregated annual order quantities. We incorporate all this in a multi-period multi-product multi-echelon supply chain planning problem and develop a mixed integer programming (MIP) model for it. Leading commercial MIP solvers take 40 minutes on average to get any feasible solution for realistic instances of our model. With the aim of getting high-quality feasible solutions quickly, we develop an algorithm that constructs a good initial solution and three other iterative algorithms that improve this initial solution and are capable of getting very fast high quality primal solutions. Two of the latter three algorithms are based on MIP-based local search and the third algorithm incorporates a variable neighborhood Descent (VND) combining the first two. We present numerical results for a set of instances based on a real-world supply chain in the food industry and show the efficiency of our customized algorithms. The leading commercial solver CPLEX finds only a very few feasible solutions that have lower total costs than our initial solution within a three hours run time limit. All our iterative algorithms well outperform CPLEX. The VND algorithm has the best average performance. Its average relative gap to the best known feasible solution is within 1% in less than 40 minutes of computing time.

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