Cognitive Narratological Study Of Ian McEwan’s Fictions

This thesis aims to study the British contemporary writer Ian McEwan’s first novel The Cement Garden, his Booker Prize winning novel Amsterdam and some of his significant short stories, such as Butterflies, Disguises and Conversation with a Cupboard Man, from the perspective of cognitive narratology. All the above texts are important ones among McEwan’s early works. They present comparatively obvious narrative characteristics of the author and are worth of cognitive narratological studying. As a subdomain within postclassical narratology or contextualist narratology, cognitive narratology can be defined as the study of mind-relevant aspects of storytelling practices.The research is mainly divided into three parts. The first chapter, taking the image or context of funeral, cement, Amsterdam and butterfly in daily life and in McEwan’s works as examples, discusses the fundamental questions of cognitive narratologygeneric and specific context, and conventional and individual cognition- to demonstrate that researchers should study different context through different methods. The next chapter, through the analysis of two of McEwan’s narrative strategies, discusses the narrative effects and readers’ possible response. On one hand, through the examination of the unreliable narrators in Dead As They Come, The Cement Garden and Solid Geometry, it explains the textual characteristics of the clues left by the author and how the readers detect the narrator’s unreliability through these clues. On the other hand, it observes the focalization and the empathy evoked thereafter, analyzing the influences of the narrative strategies on the readers’ reception and appreciation process. The last chapter explores the role of narrative in the cognitive development of the narrators or main characters in The Cement Garden, Amsterdam, Disguises and Conversation with a Cupboard Man. It analyzes the two forms of narrative disruptions- narrative disintegration and narrative dominance-that may happen in the construction of self and the effects of narrative on characters’ cognitive frameworks development and behaviors in the development of conscious awareness respectively.This thesis makes an attempt to explain that the plot, context and character traits are not purely contextual features and structures of narrative, but a result of the concerted interaction between the author and the readers. One of the tasks for the readers’ to read and comprehend a text is to analyze the change and development of the characters’ cognition, and through this process, the cognitive frameworks of the readers are developed as well.