Interiority as Narrative Agency in Teju Cole’s Open City

Abstract

This article examines interiority as a narrative technique in Teju Cole’s Open City (London: Faber & Faber, 2011). It suggests that Cole employs this form to depict the dynamics of migration and globalisation and the various ways in which the peripatetic protagonist, Julius, dislocated and marked by whimsical restlessness, becomes a cosmopolitan subject—or a fraught “Afropolitan”, as other critics have argued. This article draws on existing studies to propose another direction of inquiry. It shows how, in dispensing with conventional novelistic forms of plot with well-defined characters and dialogue, the novel privileges interiority as a principal mode of articulation. It postulates that interiority names and describes the agential utility of an intersubjective consciousness that inhabits the protagonist, and that this is a consciousness through which he performs a sense of presence and belonging in the metropolitan centres of the Western world.