What’s in a voice? Quantifying the Narrating Instance in Rachel Kushner’s The Mars Room

Abstract

This paper aims at reconsidering aspects raised by criticism of Rachel Kushner’s The Mars Room (2018). While almost universally praised for its contents, the novel has been met with a more diverse response as far as its stylistic and narrative structures are concerned. By adopting a double methodology, grounded in traditional close reading and quantitative tools derived from corpus stylistics, this analysis addresses the issue of voice and perspective in Kushner’s novel in order to show how ultimately traditional their use is. These findings thus clash with previous views on The Mars Room, and they confirm the more aprioristically identifiable impact certain narratological features (such as focalization) tend to have on style when compared to broader notions like that of voice, which intrinsically involves a broader ‘field of action’ and is thus more problematic when it comes to quantification.