‘All This Happened, More or Less’: the Influence of Modernism and Postmodernism on Omniscient Narration in Twentieth and Twenty-first-century Novels.
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2016-07-01
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en
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The topic of this thesis is omniscient narration in late-twentieth and twenty-first-century novels. Narration in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughter-House Five, Zadie Smith’s White Teeth and Ian McEwan’s Atonement have been analysed to see if and how modernism and postmodernism have influenced omniscient narration in late-twentieth and twenty-first-century fiction. The omniscient narrator was a common type of narration in nineteenth-century realist fiction, but this thesis focuses on the ways the omniscient narration has changed since. Key characteristics of modernism and postmodernism, like fragmentation, subjectivity and metafictionality are visible in the narration style of these three novels: both Slaughter-House Five and Atonement feature a subjective omniscient narrator, while White Teeth’s narrator presents herself as observer to the individual perspectives of the characters. This research establishes how omniscient narration has changed since the nineteenth century and how it is connected to modernism and postmodernism, as well as touching upon omniscient narrations connection to historiographic metafictional concerns and the debate about the death of the novel.
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Faculteit der Letteren