Abstract
The paper will outline the possibilities of philosophical interpretation of selected works by Bohumil Hrabal, with respect to the question to what extent is the ethical perspective of these works shaped by the narrative representation of visual experience. The importance of visual motifs for the constitution of the protagonists' subjectivity and their intersubjective relations will be followed mostly in novella All My Cats.
In case of this novella the author's handling of narrative focalization somewhat deviates from the trend of ethically ungrounded, judgement-withholding narrators we typically encounter in Hrabal's stories. In the context of the phenomenology of perception of M.
Merleau-Ponty and the ethics of Emmanuel Levinas, the paper will attempt to illustrate that this evocation of affective and ethical bonds of the narrator to the fictional world is achieved precisely through Hrabal's specific usage of the motifs of gaze and vision.