Unreliable Narrator Research Articles

Narrer les désillusions intimes à l’époque de la désillusion. Tanguy Viel et les formes contemporaines du récit d’amitié

NARRATING PERSONAL DISILLUSIONMENTS IN THE ERA OF DISILLUSIONMENT: TANGUY VIEL AND CONTEMPORARY FORMS OF FRIENDSHIP STORYFriendship is one of the key motifs in Viel’s work. Its importance is highlighted especially in his early novels. In his exploration of this eternal problem of a relationship with another person, Viel departs from typically realistic novelistic conventions and combines subversive rewriting of genres, typical of contemporary fiction, with unreliable narration, manifested in a peculiar multivocality. The aim of this article is to analyse this textual duality and the manner in which it contributes to the creation of a touching story about human friendships.

Interpreting ›Unreliable Interpreting‹

AbstractTo enable a clear and detailed description of narrative features, narratological concepts should be well-defined and unambiguous. My paper aims to contribute to this by analyzing, reworking, and relabeling two models of ›unreliable interpreting‹. I show how these two models developed by Phelan/Martin and Margolin are based on relevant intuitions yet have problematic aspects. Building upon these approaches, it is reasonable to integrate two concepts into our theory of unreliable narration: that of ›unreliable belief‹, which, like unreliable reporting, concerns the realm of facts but affects the narrator’s cognition instead of his utterances, and that of ›inference-related unreliability‹, which is concerned with the validity of the narrator’s reasoning on both the utterance and cognitive level. By integrating these two concepts, this approach makes the theory of unreliability more robust and helps provide better answers to common questions in the field of unreliable narration.

Acts of Communion

An article about the aesthetics, politics and dramaturgy of taste implicit in Reckless Sleepers' The Last Supper (2003). The authors explore notions of gustatory taste and the multi-sensory potential of serving food in performance and the ethics of (mis)representation of real life events; the assassination of the Romanovs and Che Guavara proving to be the most unreliable narratives. The piece sits between fact and fiction, the found and the fabricated, and is punctuated with the arrival of the real last suppers of convicted felons. The work speaks from a primarily western religious perspective, inspired by Da Vinci's Last Supper (1498) and the act of communion that takes place in church services. In this way, it leans towards an occidental, spiritual notion of taste, where transubstantiation allows the rice paper script to become both the body of Christ and the symbol of his own last supper.Nietzsche's notion of intoxication comes into play as performers and audience share wine, or blood, and drink to absent friends. The article proposes that the piece enacts a dramaturgy much like a meal, where conversation ebbs and flows, and a sense of togetherness, or act of communion, is engendered. The authors posit that the tacit contract with the audience is redrawn by food as both an aesthetic and dramaturgical encounter. As such, it becomes an invocation (or intoxication) of taste, mortality and last-ness that continues to resonate thirteen years after its devising. Both Pinchbeck and Westerside wrote about this performance when they first saw it at the same venue in 2006, both conducted interviews with members of the Reckless Sleepers, Mole Wetherell and Tim Ingram, for their ongoing research into dramaturgy, aesthetics and taste in contemporary performance. Now this research is woven together into a tapestry of reflections on the piece, a pentimento of memories.

"I'm the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life."

Holden Caulfield is a noticeable narrator. As the protagonist in J. D. Salinger’s novel The Catcher in the Rye, he displays a multitude of narrative idiosyncrasies: he contradicts himself, exaggerates his recount of events, and often leaves the reader half-informed on his motivations and emotional life. Much of his narrative style hints at him as a potentially unreliable narrator, although it is widely impossible to determine when his narrative account is unreliable and when it is not. This creates interpretative problems as the reader can never know for sure whether they are supposed to take Holden’s account literally or to look for a veiled meaning beyond his statements.
 This essay explores the consequences of potentially unreliable narration in a specific episode of the novel: Holden’s night-time encounter with his former teacher Mr Antolini. When Holden sleeps on Mr Antolini’s sofa after spending exhausting days in Manhattan, he awakes to find Mr Antolini petting his head. Holden interprets this behaviour as a “flitty pass,” as a sexual transgression on his former teacher’s part, stating that “[t]hat kind of stuff’s happened to me about twenty times since I was a kid.” But what exactly is Holden referring to, and can the reader trust this statement, considering that Holden’s narration regularly borders unreliability?
 Considering the fact that the text rarely reveals the truth behind Holden’s account, I argue that multiple interpretations of this chapter are not only possible but are at the stylistic heart of the novel. On the one hand, this reading of the novel offers an interpretation of a key episode, by considering a history of sexual abuse in Holden’s biography. On the other hand, it indicates that Holden’s account mirrors the mode of narration that would be expected from a troubled and disoriented adolescent – a factor that despite the potentially unreliable mode of narration adds to the sense of authenticity in the novel.

Gogol’s discourse on madness in his autobiographical records and works: focusing on Diary of a madman

This article attempts to reinterpret the meaning of ‘madness’ of Poprishchin, hero of Diary of Madman (1835), in light of the Gogol’s mysterious desire. Inferring the prototype of Poprishchin’s desire from Gogol’s autobiographical records, this article explains the hero’s madness as a sort of language inherent in his desire. Gogol has been an ‘unreliable narrator’ all his life, which makes it hard to grasp what he really had in mind with his calling. Correspondences with mother show how Gogol acted unexpectedly and by doing so how he brought dubious reputation upon himself. Nevertheless, for Gogol madness was an object more of an inquiry than a disgrace. Instead of refuting the charge of madness, Gogol accepts fact that there are contradictory views of him regardless of his intention. When he came back shortly after leaving for Lübeck in the Divine Will, he thought that even his hardship of approaching “the high and beautiful” was ordained by God. Consequently, in his alleged madness Gogol sees not a dreadful judgement but a clue to Providence. Gogol and Poprishchin are similar in that both are well aware of what constitutes madness. Poprishchin understands that assuming the title or assuming the someone else’s identity is an act of insanity. So his decision to declare himself as the king of Spain mirrors the reality in which no one considered him insane even though he believed himself a titular councilor. However, Poprishchin is trying to keep his desire in silence until it is realized. His ultimate goal is to demonstrate how another abnormal incident can enter the world and settle down as if nothing had happened.

Unreliable Narration in Law and Fiction

This article revisits long-standing debates about objective interpretation in the common law system by focusing on a crime novel by Agatha Christie and judicial opinion by the Ontario High Court. Conventions of the crime fiction and judicial opinion genres inform readers’ assumption that the two texts are objectively interpretable. This article challenges this assumption by demonstrating that unreliable narration is often, if not always, a feature of written communication. Judges, like crime fiction writers, are storytellers. While these authors might intend for their stories to be read in certain ways, the potential for interpretive disconnect between unreliable narrators and readers means there can be no essential quality that marks a literary or legal text’s meaning as objective. Taken to heart, this demands that judges try to narrate their decisions more reliably so that readers are able to interpret the texts correctly when it matters most.

The Word and the Wheel: Navigating the Incarnation in Twentieth-Century Literature

This essay maintains that an incarnational aesthetic often privileges the concrete over the abstract, transcends the dichotomy between the secular and the sacred, and offers a glimpse into the intersection of time and eternity, as evidenced in the works of Kathleen Norris, Madeleine L’Engle, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, and Jorie Graham, though such themes are given particular resonance in the non-linear narrative technique of Graham Greene’s novel The End of the Affair. Greene seeks to represent the simultaneity of past, present, and future in the cyclical technique of his novel, which offers the unreliable narrator a redemptive entrance into God’s wheeling story of eternal love. The revelation of Christ’s Incarnation and a revaluation of corporeal presence stand at the heart of this novel, underscoring how human intimacy is a window into divine intimacy.

Skank, or the Queer Fascination with Animalic Notes in Contemporary Niche Perfume

Abstract This article looks at the popularity and overt foregrounding of animalic notes in contemporary niche perfume. Although the natural animal notes are rarely used in contemporary perfume and are usually replaced by synthetic aroma chemicals, the idea of them still intrigues. This article proposes the importance of understanding this desire for the animalic in terms of the psychology of disgust, theories of the abject, and a Western history of scatologic art. It examines some of the spaces and places in which the author encounters perfume and the related affects. The article also proposes that the fascination with animalic fragrance also speaks to the ontology of the sense of smell, a fragile ontology that rests on the unreliable narration of memory. The possibility of developing a queer understanding of this subjectively disrupting fascination with the animalic through the lens of postcontinental queer theories is examined.

Unreliable Third Person Narration? The Case of Katherine Mansfield

Abstract The concept of an unreliable third-person narrator may seem a contradiction in terms. The very act of adopting a third-person stance to tell a story would appear to entail an acceptance of a basic need for truth-telling, a commitment to what Wayne Booth terms the implied author’s “norms of the work.” Nonetheless, in the essay that follows, three of Katherine Mansfield’s short stories – “A Cup of Tea” (1922), “Bliss” (1918) and “Revelations” (1920) – will be examined in order to demonstrate how the strategic suppression of the distinction between the voice of the narrator and that of the central character can lead to a strong sense of unreliability. In order to read such narratives effectively, the reader must reappraise the value of certain other stylistic elements, including the use of directives involved with directly quoted speech, seemingly minor discrepancies between adjacent sentences and, perhaps most importantly, the structure of the fiction itself. We contend that Mansfield’s use of this form of unreliable third-person fiction is her unique contribution to the short story genre.

Unreliability and the Animal Narrator in Richard Adams’s The Plague Dogs

Richard Adams’s talking animal story The Plague Dogs (1978), with its deeply genre-atypical mode of narration, offers a multiplicity of avenues to explore the literary animal as animal. The story draws much of its power from the psychological complexity and related unreliability of both canine narrators, two research lab escapees gone feral. Both the terrier Snitter and the black mongrel Rowf are mentally ill and experience a highly subjective, part-fantastic world. In episodes of zero focalization, a sarcastic voice comments on the plot from the off, aggressively attacking a thoroughly anthropocentric superstructure the protagonists themselves are oblivious of, and presenting all that is normally constructed as “rational” in the implied reader’s world as a carnivalesque farce. Combining these equally unreliable narratives, The Plague Dogs creates a unique mixture of what Phelan (2007) calls “estranging” and “bonding” unreliability and brings to light the devastating consequences of anthropocentrism. The Plague Dogs not only defamiliarizes a genre usually committed to conventional means of storytelling, but the dominant Western conception of the status of animals in the world, showing that once we start to read the animal as animal, this sets into motion an avalanche of other concepts in need of re-reading, among them the very ones making up the fundamental pillars of Western societies’ anthropocentric self-conception.

Narrative unreliability and metarepresentation in Ian McEwan’s Atonement; or, why Robbie might be guilty and why nobody seems to notice

ABSTRACTUnreliability and uncertainty are at the centre of Ian McEwan’s Atonement, and discussions of the novel often emphasise this aspect of the text, arguing that it demands to be reread in light of its surprise ending. Yet such readings do not entertain a more radical doubt as to the reliability of the novel’s protagonist, Briony Tallis, and the accuracy of her adult attempt to atone for a childhood mistake. This article asks why this is the case and offers an alternative reading. It suggests that the force of the concluding section, as well as the way in which the preceding sections build to suggest that Briony’s revised version of events is correct, have effectively shut down a more far-reaching discussion of reliability and the ways in which meaning is revealed and withheld. Drawing on recent developments in narrative theory, it does not argue for an alternative orthodoxy about what ‘really’ happened and what Briony did or did not see, but rather suggests that the consensus that has accreted around her revised version of events raises important questions about the nature of narrative (un)reliability, the role of the implied author, and the ways in which narratives are read, and reread.

This is no way to tell a story: literary discourse making its way through the walled of contemporaneity

The object of this study is comprised by Stephen Leacock’s (1869-1944) novel Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912). Through the advent of humour, the narrative gives readers an opportunity to reflect upon Mariposa, the fictional town where all events in the story take place, as a setting almost lost in space and time. My objective in this article is to investigate if, how, and why Mariposa is lost in space and time, attentive to the idea of individual versus collective identity and of local values versus universal ones. Cognisant that I am grappling with a narrative from the Early XX century Canada, I take such background into account for reflecting upon the epistemological contributions of the story as constructed by an unreliable narrator, as well as to raise the hypothesis that the novel might still have much to say to contemporary Brazilian readers. DOI: 10.5935/2179-0027.20170013

Think Thrice, It's Alright: Mad Men's "The Wheel" and the Future Study of Television Narratives

This article discusses three strategies that TV shows have increasingly employed in recent years to produce what Jason Mittell, in an essay that marked the beginning of his thoughts on the issue, has called "narrative complexity": unreliable narration, counterfictional scenarios, and ellipses and anachronological narration. It uses the last minutes of "The Wheel," the final episode of the first season of AMC's Mad Men (2007–15), as its primary example. More specifically, this article proposes three different interpretations of the final moments of that episode. These readings have in common that they underline one of Mittell's central claims, namely that serial television shifts comprehension processes toward conscious hypotheses in what he describes as "operational aesthetic." However, the article will also assume a broader perspective throughout and demonstrate that the three interpretations it develops are instances of more widely spread phenomena that merit far more attention than a single article can provide. Thus, the article offers, on the one hand, a close reading of an episode of Mad Men against the background of the early seasons of the show, but, on the other, it also identifies three topics for further fruitful research on television narrative more generally.

Kazuo Ishiguro and Memory by Yugin Teo

Reviewed by: Kazuo Ishiguro and Memory by Yugin Teo Amit Marcus Yugin Teo, Kazuo Ishiguro and Memory. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. xi + 176 pp. Memory is one of the most discussed topics in both fictional narratives and the literary and critical theory of the last decades. The reasons for the fascination of many contemporary writers with memory are almost as variable as the work of memory itself: the intricate relations between memory and history (as well as historical writing); memory as a crucial element for the development, the retention, and the effacement of self-identity; and memory as a fundamental factor in the stream of consciousness. Perhaps more emphatically than any other cognitive process, memory is evidence of the construction (rather than the reflection) of reality by the human mind. Yugin Teo’s book Kazuo Ishiguro and Memory chimes in with this cultural and literary interest in memory. Teo’s approach to Ishiguro’s fictional narratives is basically thematic. Accordingly, his argument is structured on three major (but not necessarily sequential) phases in memory work: forgetting, remembering, and, eventually, a release of the unfortunate consequences of memory. He emphasizes the interrelations between Ishiguro’s insights concerning memory in his fictional writings and the philosophical ideas of Paul Ricoeur, especially in Memory, History, Forgetting (2004) and The Course of Recognition (2005). Teo’s interdisciplinary approach also extends to film: he compares the (limitations of) representation of trauma and loss in Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour (1959) with Ishiguro’s novel A Pale View of Hills (1982). A major topic of the first part of the book is narrative unreliability, which is linked to the question of the very (un)trustworthiness of memory. Teo claims that the unreliable narrators of some of Ishiguro’s fictional narratives struggle to reconcile past memories with present circumstances and discover that the complicated process of remembering and retelling events leads to a less accurate and less objective version of the past. The distortion of memory results in part from self-deception (see also Marcus 2006). Following Kathleen Wall (1994), Teo claims that no narrator — or any human being — is entirely reliable, coherent, and rational. Self-reflexive readers will recognize not only the narrator’s flawed memory but also the limitations of their own memory, which is impaired by biases, mistakes, and delusions. They will, in turn, realize that they are neither superior to the unreliable narrator nor less susceptible to memory flaws. Such a recognition bridges the cognitive and moral gap between reader and text and causes the reader to empathize with the emotions and experiences of the narrator. However, Teo does not seem to differentiate the reader’s inaccurate memory of the story told by Ishiguro’s narrator — an inaccuracy that is the product of a perplexed and perplexing rhetoric designed by the implied author — from the biased memory any reader (or person) has of events and experiences from his or her own life. [End Page 193] The first part of the book continues with an exploration of another type of forgetting related to a repressed traumatic past, which can only be represented through a fragmentary narrative. The last section of this chapter is devoted to collective and national forgetting. Teo contends that some of Ishiguro’s protagonists (and other characters) distance themselves from accountability and are motivated by the wish to promote a version of history that disclaims the responsibility of a nation for the atrocities it inflicted on others. The second part of the book begins with a discussion of remembering as the recognition of one’s own self through narration. In this respect, too, the fictional narrator may trigger self-reflection in the reader by means of identification and empathy. Recognition, however, does not necessarily alter the narrator’s or reader’s worldview. In this part Teo also discusses testimony, based on Ricoeur’s argument that memory can be challenged but not eradicated. Following Susan Rubin Suleiman’s Crises of Memory and the Second World War (2006), he argues that the injunction to forget “becomes absurd as well as reprehensible when it is uttered by — or on behalf of — the perpetrator” (77). This is illustrated by the testimony of the clones...

Katalin Street by Len Rix

she picks apart our understanding of reality and reliability, challenging assumptions of the truth while examining the nature of friendship and life in urban spaces. Elena is a young and educated publishing professional who finds herself struggling financially after being downgraded from a contract employee to an independent worker. Struggling to make ends meet, she takes in a roommate named Susana, who has just returned to Madrid after years of living abroad. The two women get off to a rocky start, with Susana’s quirks and elusive behavior underscoring Elena’s sense of isolation. Eventually the two reach a level of intimacy by nature of their proximity , a growing domestic warmth that is juxtaposed against Elena’s frequent observations of the changing city around her. Living on the margins of the lower middle class, Elena notes the economic hardship sweeping the city and changing the way people live. But while the story feels straightforward , there’s more to it than meets the eye. The novel opens with a brief story Susana tells Elena, about a period of poor mental health and the intense sexual encounters she sought during that time. Susana is positioned as an unreliable narrator, with Elena interjecting to speak directly to the reader about her misgivings and to share personal asides. The dynamic, which carries over into the Elena-narrated bulk of the novel, is clear: Elena is trustworthy, while Susana might be exaggerating or flatout deceitful. But a twist later in the novel challenges the perspective from which the reader has approached the narrative, making a simple story a deeper meditation on the way we give our trust to those who tell us stories. Written in a unique voice that evokes the alienation Elena feels so deeply, Navarro ’s novel is a complex yet not overwhelming work that deals as adeptly with relationships between people as it does with the relationship people feel to their cities and their work. Pinning it all together with subtle effectiveness, the larger questions the book raises are pleasantly jarring. Taken as a whole, the novel is thoroughly gripping. Bridey Heing Washington, DC Magda Szabó. Katalin Street. Trans. Len Rix. New York. New York Review Books Classics. 2017. 235 pages. Katalin Street is the third Magda Szabó novel to be published by New York Review Books Classics. Szabó, who died in 2007, was a Hungarian author whose work examined the intersections of fascism, betrayal, family, and love, among other topics. Her prose is a powerful reminder of just how resonant the relationship between language and memory can be, especially when entangled within the matrices of families and communities living under the shadow of fascism. Katalin Street, which won the Prix Cévennes for Best European Novel in 2007, depicts the lives of three families thrown together on Katalin Street in Budapest from the prewar period up to the tumultuous unrest of 1968. The children who figure prominently in the three families are Blálint, the son of the major; Irén and Blanka Elekes; and the shy and reserved Henriette Held. When the Germans arrive in Budapest in 1944, members of the Held family, who happen to be Jewish, are placed into hiding until they are discovered and deported. However, Henriette manages to escape deportation only to suffer a no less tragic fate. World Literature in Review 78 WLT NOVEMBER–DECEMBER 2017 As provocative as the events in the novel are, the style Szabó employs is also worthy of our attention. The novel itself can be confusing until the reader discovers that it is not told in a linear sequence. This confusion adds to the overall atmosphere of the novel, an atmosphere that is heavy with foreboding. The disruptive manner of the novel’s beginning highlights the coming storm that the Germans, and later the Soviets, are bringing to Hungary. Moreover, each chapter in the “Moments and Episodes” section switches between third person and first, which is told from Irén’s point of view, thereby juxtaposing a detached and intimate point of view. There are moments in Katalin Street when one is strongly reminded of Harry Mulisch’s The Assault. Both novels deal with German occupation and the culpability of...

Alone by Cyn Balog

Reviewed by: Alone by Cyn Balog Karen Coats Balog, Cyn Alone. Sourcebooks Fire, 2017 [288p] ISBN 978-1-4926-5547-3 $17.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 7-10 Seda's mother has inherited a decrepit old mansion, formerly run by relatives as a murder mystery hotel, and Seda is upset that her mother refuses to sell the property to anyone who won't continue its tradition. She's more troubled, though, that the voice inside her head, which has been with her since childhood, is growing angrier and more powerful the longer they stay at the creepy mansion. When a group of boarding-school students get stranded at the hotel in a snowstorm on their way to a ski holiday, Seda doesn't want them to see how weird she and the whole situation are, but her mother seeks to make the best of it by staging an elaborate murder-themed scavenger hunt—a plan that goes dangerously awry. The slow spooling out of Seda's devolution from angsty, sympathetic teen to seriously unreliable narrator is well handled; the sense of unease grows as Seda moves from seeming ordinary, to just a bit off, to full-on mentally unstable and vindictive. Along the way, Balog cannily suggests several different possibilities: that the problems might be her mother's, or that there may be something sinister about the way her younger siblings, two sets of twins, are too at ease among the gruesome props in the house, or that there may in fact be something real behind Seda's fears, making the suspense nail-bitingly effective and the final reveal surprising. Hints of both The Shining and The Turn of the Screw haunt this tense thriller as readers are placed in the same position as the other characters in their misreading of Seda. KC Copyright © 2017 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Hamlet in a “Nutshell” – postmodern interpretation of the famous tragedy of all time

I n 2016 while the world was commemorating the 400th anniversary of the death of William Shakespeare [1564–1616] we heard Hamlet’s voice coming from Ian McEwan’s brand new book “Nutshell”. This time Hamlet (his name is not mentioned throughout the novel) is where Claudius wanted to send him, namely in today’s England, however still in his mother’s womb waiting to be born in two weeks’ time: “So here I am, upside down in a woman. Arms patiently crossed, waiting, waiting and wondering who I’m in and what I’m in for” [1, p. 1]. The novel starts with these questions [ontological, whose? and epistemological, why?] of the foetus and till the end of the story we learn about the events from this unreliable narrator; we listen to what he hears and see what he supposes he sees. Baby Hamlet has got curious and analytical mind which makes him kick his beloved mother from inside to wake her up in order to listen to the radio in the late hours: “Cruel sport, I know, but we are both better informed by the morning” [1, p. 4] Although he is confined to a “meagre living room”, he counts himself “an innocent”, “unburdened by allegiances and obligations”, “a free spirit” and strives to perceive the conscious life bestowed upon him by “Being”: “… my idea was To be. … The beginning of conscious life was the end of illusion, the illusion of non-being, and the eruption of the real” [1, p. 2–3].

On the Semantics of Unreliable Narration

On the Semantics of Unreliable Narration

The Sex of Omission: Obscured Feminism in Chinua Achebe’s A Man of the People

This article refutes the common claim that Chinua Achebe does not represent women as active participants in his fictional communities until in his fifth novel, Anthills of the Savannah . Such criticism neglects women’s contestations of male-dominated political and aesthetic representation in A Man of the People . Readings of that novel routinely foreground the political foibles of the unreliable narrator while overlooking how his traumatic encounter with female agency shapes his narrative. By focusing on the protagonist’s repression of women’s agency, I suggest his swerve into a narrative of national politics results from a profound inability to accept women’s demands for multiple forms of recognition. A Man of the People explores obstructions to African feminism and sexual politics. As such, it ought to be read alongside the fiction of Flora Nwapa, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Tsitsi Dangarembga.

Narrative Ambiguity and the Neoliberal Bildungsroman in Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger

Narrative Ambiguity and the Neoliberal Bildungsroman in Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger Swaralipi Nandi (bio) Almost signed off in the era of late modernity, the genre of the Bildungsroman has resurged to new prominence in the contemporary scene of neoliberalism. Novels like Peter Mountford's A Young Man's Guide to Late Capitalism, Elliot Perlman's Three Dollars, Hamid Mohsin's How to be Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, Hwee Hwee Tan's Mammon Inc., Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger, and Vikas Swarup's Q&A all take up the form of the Bildungsroman to narrate the protagonist's growth in a neoliberal world order. Intricately associated with the rise of capitalism in Europe, the Bildungsroman is a narrative of a protagonist's normalization into the bourgeoisie social order. As Franco Moretti points out, the "classical" Bildungsroman coincides with the rise of market capitalism in the nineteenth century and the ensuing social transition from aristocratic to bourgeois domination; it is a genre that demonstrates the individual's integration into a transitioning society shaken by the "new and destabilizing forces of capitalism" (4). Extending the above genre definition, I propose to read the neoliberal Bildungsroman as a narrative of neoliberal subject formation, normalizing the protagonist into the new capitalistic social order. As the form of the Bildungsroman necessarily precludes a total internalization of "social norms" with "a force of conviction and optimistic clarity that will never be equaled again" (Moretti 16), the neoliberal Bildungsroman charts the protagonist's initiation into, fusion with, and active participation in the [End Page 276] normative ideology of neoliberalism. A potent example of this nascent genre, Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger, stands apart from other allies like Mohsin's How to be Filthy Rich in Rising Asia and Hwee Hwee Tan's Mammon Inc. due to its narrative ambiguity. Unlike the above mentioned novels set in the neoliberal era that sincerely chart the protagonist's growth, or mock the entire venture, The White Tiger wavers between sincere victim testimony reaching resolution through the protagonist's stellar success and an unreliable narration laden with frivolity and sarcasm often in a manner of self-deprecation. I read this anxiety of the text to both conform and rebel against the idea of neoliberal subjecthood as symptomatic of the protagonist negotiating the demands of global capitalism and sociopolitical identity in the postcolonial nation state. Going against the popular reading of the novel as a criticism of neoliberalism, I read the novel as a complex dialectic between individualism and community, reflected in the anxiety of its narrative voice, which is resolved when the protagonist becomes capitalism's social avatar. Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger takes up the form of the Bildungsroman to narrate the story of its protagonist in a new, emerging, post-liberalization India. The Indian novel in English has recently moved beyond the shadow of Salman Rushdie and the generation of writers who mused over colonialism, the postcolonial nation state, and the Emergency period. The contemporary Indian novel in English captures the new tremors caused by the overwhelming influx of a global capitalism that is restructuring every aspect of Indian life. According to Rana Dasbupta, the change in trend is "an acknowledgement of the country's growing economic clout and its embrace of global capitalism—a fact that has also caused upheaval in its chaotic cities and social fabric." Asserting that the new Indian novel no longer consists of "family sagas" or "the colorful celebrations of Indian language and sentiment," Dasgupta draws attention to the emergence of the metropolitan novel that focuses on the dynamics of urban existence in a contemporary post-globalization India. Post-millennial Indian novels thus chronicle a metamorphosing India grappling with the forces of neoliberal globalization, formulating new notions of identity and citizenship, remapping the landscapes according to market imperatives, and witnessing a major upheaval in the socio-cultural-economic structure of their nation. With its characteristic focus on the life and growth of a single individual, a Bildungsroman like The White Tiger effectively embodies the changing [End Page 277] sensibilities of neoliberal India. Written in an epistolary form and addressed to the Chinese Premiere, who is both the guest on...