An Ethical Interpretation of Unnatural Narrative:The Foetus Narrator and Its Brian Text in Ian McEwan's Nutshell

Abstract

Abstract: Taking Ian McEwan's Nutshell as its central concern, this article attempts to investigate the unnaturalness of the novel and offers an ethical interpretive option. In doing so, it attempts to respond to Ansgar Nünning's proposal for bringing narratology into dialogue with ethical literary criticism. As a parody to Shakespeare's classical drama Hamlet, Nutshell, in the form of unnatural narrative, presents an impossible storyworld of kinslaying, incest, and revenge. Apart form examining the unnatural narrative strategies of Nutshell from such aspects as unnatural narrator and unnatural mind, it resourcefully interprets the work from the perspective of ethical literary criticism, and the concept brain text in particular, which promises to challenge the naturalizing readings and unnaturalizing readings in the current conceptual framework of unnatural narratology, and thus opens up a new interpretive option to unnatural narrative.

Key words: Ian McEwan, Nutshell, unnatural narrative, brain text

Shang Biwu. An Ethical Interpretation of Unnatural Narrative:The Foetus Narrator and Its Brian Text in Ian McEwan's Nutshell[J]. Foreign Literature Studies, 2018, 40(3): 30-42.

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