Subverting narrative: unreliability and textual ethics in Atwood, McEwan, Rushdie and Foer

Abstract

In order to define an aesthetics of ethical, self-aware fiction, and to outline the ethics implicit in an aesthetic understanding of narrative, this thesis utilizes narrative theory in a close analysis of four relatively contemporary novels by Atwood, McEwan, Foer, and Rushdie. I examine the tension between ontological and epistemological concerns within the four novels in light of their critical backgrounds and narrative structures, and outline the interface between ethics and aesthetics present in each narrative. It is my contention that unreliable writer characters, a newly-identified category of narrator, dramatize aesthetic and ethical engagements with narrative. As a result, they render story and discourse as components of one another, and provide a fruitful exploration of the self-aware mediations between narrative theory and literary fiction in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Self-reflexivity, unreliability, aesthetics, and ethics are all central concerns of these four novels. The consequences of fictional engagements with history via unreliable narratives and writer characters, are also explored in light of autobiographical and possible worlds theories. Both the persistent presence of texts-within-texts, and the fictional dramatization of creating text, serves to defamiliarize the mimetic functions of the novel. This narrative logic is completely undermined in self-reflexive fiction. The perspectives on narrative creation, interpretation, and communication implicitly and explicitly represented by the writer characters in these novels are primary ingredients in novelistic discourse. This struggle is mirrored by the process of reading their complex narratives. The apparently slippery categories of author/writer and novel/narrative in the four works of fiction that form this investigation neatly dovetail with elements of Bakhtin’s literary project. Unreliable narrators and self-referential narratives compound the desire for truth by explicitly acknowledging it within their narrative, and at the same time demonstrating its objective impossibility.