Unnatural Temporalities In Ian McEwan’s The Child In Time

Ian McEwan is one of the most accomplished contemporary novelists in Britain.His early fiction The Child in Time is widely known for its unique narrative structure and its exploration of the themes of time as well as childhood.This thesis focuses on the unnatural temporalities in the novel,examining how they deconstruct our realworld assumptions about time and provide a new definition of childhood.The main body of this thesis is composed of three chapters.Chapter one examines the unnatural temporalities in which a temporal progression is disrupted with its chronology interrupted at both the story and the discourse level and its singleness overturned by the co-existing retrogressive temporality and parallel temporality.Chapter two analyses the unnatural temporalities of slow time in which the process of birth recurs together with the unnatural temporalities of time ceasing that are intimately connected with the childlike obsession with nature and the present.Chapter three discusses the unnatural temporalities in which the borders between the past,the present,and the future are destabilised by Stephen’s time travel and the merging of the events of different historical periods.The concluding section points out that the unnatural temporalities in the novel reveal childhood being a blessed state that every adult is potentially able to relive at any age through three plausible ways: to embrace a new beginning by letting go of any given adult roles,to regain the childhood empathy with nature,and to retrieve the childhood obsession with the present moment.The novel also points out the significance of returning to childhood: it allows modern adults to rediscover the meaning of life in the oppressively time-keeping and rapidly urbanised modern world.