Abstract
This paper examines this view of “unreliable” or “little narrative” or “incredulity toward metanarrative” in Martin Amis’s novel Night Train as an anti-detective novel. In so doing, the paper falls into two parts. The first part focuses upon the convention of traditional “reliable” or “metanarrative” in a typical traditional detective story, in which Mike Hoolihan as a detective investigates Jennifer Faulkner’s suicide by collecting all the possible evidences and then examining them in a chronological linear way to solve her enigmatic death: who has killed her? Why was she murdered? If it is suicide, why has she ended her life? However, the paper also discusses that the way Mike passionately attempts to solve Jennifer’s mysterious death is not possible due not only to lack of evidences but also to the fact that there occurs various interpretations about her death, including Mike’s her one, which, after a while, turns into a psychological evaluation of the case with her own emotional involvement. Hence Jennifer’s death remains a mystery from the beginning to the end in the novel. This situation obviously defies the expectation of her father Tom as in the traditional sense because why Tom hires Mike as an “exceptional interrogator” with an outstanding “paperwork” in the past is to clarify the case and then appease his anxiety, as well as the mystery of his daughter’s death. Through his representation of Mike in such a condition, Amis apparently illuminates that it is almost impossible to create a detective story with a final legitimate total meaning and resolution as in a typical traditional detective novel in an age based on fragmentation, uncertainty, doubt, interruption, lack of authority, and self-expression.
Highlights
This paper examines this view of “unreliable” or “little narrative” or “incredulity toward metanarrative” in Martin Amis’s novel Night Train as an anti-detective novel
Historical situations and socio-cultural realities since World War II, which have radically transformed people’s perceptions towards life, meaning, reality, world and literature, have obviously undermined the basis of such a “reliable” or “metanarrative”, interrogating the view of a single unified authoritative narrative as being fixed, total, objective, and truthful in the final resolution. What both Booth and Lyotard propose is the perceptions of “unreliable” (1983, pp, 1437) and “little narrative” and “incredulity toward metanarrative” (1984, pp, 60, xxiv), which reject the totality of meaning but favours local and provisional knowledge, multiple voices, openness, self-contradiction, inscrutability and irrelevance in the postmodern sense. This paper examines this view of “unreliable” or “little narrative” and “incredulity toward metanarrative” in Martin Amis’s novel Night Train (1997) as an anti-detective novel
The first part focuses upon the convention of traditional “reliable” or “metanarrative” in a typical traditional detective story
Summary
This paper examines this view of “unreliable” or “little narrative” or “incredulity toward metanarrative” in Martin Amis’s novel Night Train as an anti-detective novel. Amis parodies the traditional detective story when he represents his fictional character Mike Hoolihan, a former homicide woman police officer, in a way that she privately investigates the death of Jennifer Rockwell, the daughter of Colonel Tom Rockwell, a high-ranking police official.
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