William Boyd’s The Blue Afternoon and the Limits of Human Knowledge

Abstract

ABSTRACTOmniscience is an attribute that no human being possesses. Novelists who create omniscient narrators are aware of this, and they expect us to suspend our disbelief in their narrators’ illusory all-knowingness. Significantly, Boyd disrupts our suspension of disbelief in his historiographic metafiction, The Blue Afternoon, in the interests of persuading us that the insoluble puzzle central to his novel is a counterpart to Schopenhauer’s description of the world as a “remarkable, problematical, […] unfathomable and ever-disquieting riddle.” The limits of human knowledge make it impossible for the riddle of the world ever to be solved.