| dc.description.abstract | This thesis seeks to discuss and define the concept of human life and its relationship with narrative as this is probed, questioned, and represented in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) and Isabel Greenberg’s The One Hundred Nights of Hero (2016). Both of these literary works place a particular focus on the way in which narrative is inexorably bound up with formative ideas of what it means to be human. What is more, both Midnight’s Children and The One Hundred Nights of Hero suggest how, in the wider frame of narrative, notions of the human can be seen to be constructed on an unstable, shifting sense of textuality. The thesis will explore the way in which the primary texts arguably suggest that narrative is tantamount to a human life and, correspondingly, how the construct that is a human life is informed, shaped, and interpolated through narrative.
The project takes its cue from the claim that narrative is the medium by which we think and understand our existence and, correspondingly, that narrative is shaped by the way in which we experience life. The first aim of the thesis is to delineate to what extent narrative and human life are intertwined, and whether the stages of human life correlate with the stages of a narrative text. In order to discuss this notion, the thesis will be organized into beginning, middle, and end which largely correspond with birth, life, and death respectively. The second aim is to try to understand the way in which temporality interacts and intersects with the aforementioned stages of both human life and narrative work. In order to achieve this, I will explicate the discourse of Julia Kristeva, Paul Ricouer, Frank Kermode, and Peter Brooks alongside a contextualisation of their theories within the analysis of the primary texts. | |
