Subjective Perspectives in Ian McEwan's Narrations

Thesis (M.A.) from the year 2006 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature grade: 13 University of Paderborn language: English abstract: Ever since McEwan's first publications his work has received considerable attention from critics and scholars. Thus it is not surprising that McEwan has been awarded with a number of prizes for his work and that he has been praised to be one of the leading representatives of the young generation.Despite the extraordinary praise of McEwan's work it has been discussed most controversially. The fact that he often engages taboo subjects like masturbation incest regression child abuse dismemberment sadism-masochism etc. earned McEwan the reputation of an author who writes to shock his audience. McEwan himself appears to be surprised about these attributions and objects them. However it seems to be undisputable that the narrations are extremely shocking but it seems that not only the choice of topics is responsible for the extreme response to McEwan's narrations. In my opinion the shock value of McEwan's narrations is mainly caused by his particular way to present these topics. In keeping with this I consider the form of McEwan's narrations to be as important as their content. McEwan seems to experiment with the employment of perspectives subjective perspectives in particular. In fact it can be argued that he taps the full potential of the employment of subjective perspectives in his narrations as the reader is confronted with the subjectivity of perspectives on all levels of textual communication. In my opinion McEwan's most outstanding accomplishment is his ability of depicting subjective perspectives in all consequence. The absence of morality in many of McEwan's narrations for example which is usually regarded as an underlying topic can also be seen as a result of depicting consistently a specific subjective perspective. Therefore this paper will examine the subjective perspectives