Minds, Mapping Minds, Mapping Minds: Reading the Complex Minds of Richard Powers’s The Echo Maker

Abstract

ABSTRACT Richard Powers’s The Echo Maker (2006) has often been praised for its psychological realism. In this article, I focus on The Echo Maker’s fictional minds to demonstrate how the novel appropriates several modernist and postmodernist themes: the instability of character, the constructed nature of the self, and a suspicion toward narrative. It does so by grounding its story in cognitive science. My approach is informed by cognitive narratology, in particular by the influential work on character identification and “theory of mind” by Alan Palmer and Lisa Zunshine. Theory of mind, which allows for fictional access to other minds, is an important motif in The Echo Maker, yet nothing in the novel allows for easy mind-reading – not for the characters themselves, and so also not for us readers. I argue that, rather than inviting identification, Powers’s novel narrativizes the cognitive processes by which we create meaning. I briefly refer to similar concerns in Proust, Beckett, Pynchon, and in other Powers novels along the way. The article thus: a) shows how a cognitive narratological approach to The Echo Maker subverts conventional readings of the novel, and b) identifies important continuities between Powers’s work and that of key modernists and postmodernists.