Literature Review on Unnatural Narrative Theory

Unnatural narrative becomes a popular theory in literary criticism. In 2016, No. 4 issue of Style is a special issue on Brian Richardson’s Target Essay “Unnatural Narrative Theory”. Narratologists such as Marie-Laure Ryan, Shen Dan, James Phelan have responded actively to this new paradigm in narrative theory. In spite of its popularity, unnatural narrative remains controversial because of its diversified definitions, the hard-to-identified manifestations of unnaturalness, and its various interpretive strategies. Accordingly, this paper tries to comb the existing literature and provide a systematic review on the definitions, the manifestations, and the interpretive strategies of unnatural narrative theory.

Unnatural narratives, Brexit and ideology in Ian McEwan’s The Cockroach

Against the backdrop of sudden shifts in global political and historical climate, our century has witnessed a convergence of turns in humanities, including the nonhuman turn and the historical turn. Ian McEwan’s latest novella, The Cockroach, is a just work along this line. Through the use of unnatural narratives within realistic context, McEwan presents readers with a world that is both strange and recognisable. By examining the unnatural narrative strategies, including the deployment of nonhuman character and omniscient narrator, McEwan expresses concerns for the future of humanity and fear for social and cultural parochialism, populism and anti-cosmopolitanism.

Joel’s Self-Redemption in the Unnatural Narrative Structure of Charlie Kaufman’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)

This essay discusses the significance of the unnatural narrative structure in Charlie Kaufman’s screenplay Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004). Oftentimes, the screenplay’s reverse chronology is studied as a backdrop to accentuate its thematic values of personal identity and memory. However, this study argued that the reverse narrative was caused by the protagonist’s self-redemption journey. To achieve this objective, two components of Kenneth Burke’s dramatism theory, dramatistic pentad and guilt-redemption cycle were utilized. The pentadic analysis explored the connection between the main characters’ actions and motives with the structure of the text while also interpreting the implication of its reverse narrative from the framework of guilt-redemption cycle. From the findings, the study affirms that the screenplay’s unnatural narrative structure i.e. reverse chronology integrally founded the narrative structure of the text by representing Joel’s regret in a sequence of guilt-redemption cycle. As a result, it showcases the versatility of dramatism theory as one of the analytical tools for narrative studies particularly on the unnatural narrative structure of screenplay texts.

Reading Strategies and Impossible Worlds in Fiction: With Reference to Lincoln in the Bardo

Postmodern fiction is marked by impossible worlds, the appreciation of which challenges readers and draws upon different cognitive operations. The present study reacts to the reading strategies proposed by Alber, J. 2016. Unnatural Narrative: Impossible Worlds in Fiction and Drama. Lincoln, NB and London: University of Nebraska Press. It adopts and adapts these strategies in a case study of Saunders’s experimental novel, Lincoln in the Bardo (2017). There is an attempt to investigate the cognitive operations that are activated in the process of communicating with and understanding such texts. The study evinces the pros and cons of Alber’s reading strategies. It proposes the cognitive operation of schematization in both online and offline forms as another reading strategy which helps readers understand impossibilities in texts.

On Unnatural Narrative in Post-9/11 Fiction Flight

In the wake of innumerable and insightful studies on the unnatural narratology at home and abroad, it develops into a post-classical narratology that is comparable to female narratology, rhetoric narratology, and cognitive narratology. Taking the native American writer Sherman Alexie’s Flight as its central concern, the essay attends to explore the unnaturalness of the novel and further elaborates on its thematic meaning. In Alexie’s Flight, as a post-9/11 fiction, its unnaturalness can be explored by such elements as unnatural storyworlds, unnatural minds and unnatural acts of narration. The intentional violation of conventional narration further highlights the hero’s crisis and reconstruction of his identity in the post-9/11 world changed with the miserable memory in his childhood, his sublimation from terrorism to pacifism during his time travel and the regain of love in his final foster family, which consequently contributes to the final change of his appellation from “Zits” to “Michael”.