چکیده:
This paper aims to offer a critical reading of the contemporary English author
Ian McEwan’s fifth novel entitled Black Dogs (1992). I postulate that literary
critics have frequently read his fiction for what it is not. As such, McEwan’s
thought-provoking engagement with cultural questions has more often than not
gone unexamined owing to a critical blueprint that, reducing his oeuvre to the
topoi of violence, or to a gallery of obnoxious characters branded as
psychopaths, typecasts him as a writer of disturbing, salacious fiction. Arguing
that McEwan writes to dissect and criticise contemporary culture, I offer a
reading of his novel as a literary intervention into a cultural debate. I argue
that of crucial importance in McEwan’s novel is the question of the narrative
structure through which the different segments of Black Dogs are recounted.
Drawing on the narratological concepts and terminology introduced in the works
of Gerard Genette and Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, I examine the complexities of the
narrative discourses of McEwan’s novel and its interlinking thematic analogies.
Based on this reading, I conclude that McEwan’s intervention in the ongoing
cultural debates of today makes of him a severe critic of our time.
خلاصه ماشینی:
"” (McEwan, “Adolescence and After” 526) Abstract This paper aims to offer a critical reading of the contemporary English author Ian McEwan’s fifth novel entitled Black Dogs (1992).
I argue that of crucial importance in McEwan’s novel is the question of the narrative structure through which the different segments of Black Dogs are recounted.
Drawing on the narratological concepts and terminology introduced in the works of Gerard Genette and Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, I examine the complexities of the narrative discourses of McEwan’s novel and its interlinking thematic analogies.
Through a series of interviews with June and long conversations with Bernard, Jeremy learns that the rift between his parents-in-law started after June’s terrifying encounter with two black mastiffs during their honeymoon in the south of France.
In the “Preface”, the reader is promptly alerted to the fact that “Black Dogs” is a designation for two fictions: the first is a narrative, written by Ian McEwan, about certain characters and certain events in their lives (I shall hereafter refer to this primary narrative as N1); the second is a narrative recounted by the narrator-protagonist of N1 and purported to be his memoir of his parents-in-law (this subordinate narrative will henceforth be referred to as N2).
The novel’s temporal setting reinforces the hint about McEwan’s engagement with recent European history: Bernard and June first meet each other towards the end of the Second World War in 1944 and the action of the novel continues until 1989, when the Berlin Wall is dismantled."