Decentring the Individual Subject: The Perpetual Recycling of the Narrating “I” in David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten

Abstract

SummaryBritish author David Mitchell’s debut novel Ghostwritten, published in 1999, has been lauded for its innovative nine-part structure, in which each chapter is presented as a first-person narrative that involves, each time, a different narrator with a different story. Mitchell himself describes this arrangement as a way to “locate meaning in randomness […] Each chapter offers a different reason why its events unfold as they do” (Begley 2010: 5). Such a postmodern concern with randomness is evident when the ostensible self-sufficiency of the individual account is undermined by the arbitrary, often mysterious (re)appearance of one or the other narrator as character in another’s story. Interestingly, these surprise appearances, of what could be called the “experiencing other”, work to undermine the centrality of the narrator’s story – of what could be called the “master narrative”. This destabilisation is compounded in characteristic postmodern fashion by the continual displacement of the narrating “I” from one chapter to the next. Thus, while the “I” remains – or seems to remain – a constant throughout, the individual subject is ceaselessly recycled as the experiencing other in different guises; it is a process that apparently denies the formation of an individual identity, thus ratifying the postmodern anxiety about the end of individuality. However, as I argue in this article, it is precisely this continual recycling that affords the decentred subject a chance at individuality. In a telling deconstructive gesture, Mitchell’s novel bypasses the transcendental Subject to allow a space in which the plural subject can claim its identity, paradoxically, as a singular entity.