Narrative Game in the Context of Ian McEwan’s Genre Searching

Abstract

The article analyzes the peculiarities of narrative experiments in the novels by Ian McEwan, which aims to reveal the author's genre and poetical innovation. The writer's works demonstrate numerous variants of «multiple coding»,one of the most characteristic tendencies of contemporary literature. The deceptiveness of the genre specification of McEwan's novels lies in the fact that on the surface level they are perceived as a traditional realistic narrative with an exciting plot, detailed psychological characteristics of personages, deterministic motivation of their behavior, numerous descriptions, etc. At the same time writer's works demonstrate plot uncertainty, complicated narrative organization with changes in focalization perspectives, dialogues with readers, ingenious use of various fictional comments, and implication of metatextual reflections. Therefore, to a large extent, it is due to the narrative game the traditional genre matrix is changing, filled with new meanings and possibilities. One of the productive methods of complicating the plot and narrative is the inclusion in main text a number of nested fictional texts and numerous references to classical and modern literature works. The combination of the principles of classical poetics and postmodern techniques opens up a way beyond the purely «playful» function of narrative experiments, makes it possible to pose important social, cultural, moral and philosophical problems of nowadays, and contributes to the expansion of the genre paradigm of modern novel.