Narrative Games In Sweet Tooth

Ian Russell Mc Ewan(1948-)is a preeminent contemporary British writer who has been acclaimed for in-depth inquiry into human nature,well-designed plot,and exquisite techniques.He is the author of three short story collections and fifteen novels,including the satiric novella Amsterdam,for which he won the Booker Prize in 1998,Atonement,Sweet Tooth and most recently My Purple Scented Novel.He usually uses different post-modern and experimental writing techniques in his works,and Sweet Tooth claims no exception.In Sweet Tooth,a subtly and sweetly subversive novel that is a masterful manipulation of the relationship between fiction and truth,various metafictional techniques are employed,including embedded narrative structure,parody,intertextual strategy,authorial intrusion,and so on.By virtue of the theory and practice of metafiction,through intensive reading of the novel and structural analysis,this paper tries to explain that Sweet Tooth,a stunning book written by Ian Mc Ewan in 2012,turns out to be his intricate narrative game,manipulating the intricate line between fiction and reality,exploring the new role concerning readers,as well as probing into the cooperation between the reader and the writer in metafiction.This paper is composed of six chapters.Chapter One is an introduction to Ian Mc Ewan's life and his major works,mainly his novel Sweet Tooth,including the plot,main characters,meta-narrative strategies,a detailed literature review on the novel and the author,the thesis statement,as well as research questions of this paper.Chapter Two deals with the related theories to meta-fiction,explaining the definitions of metafiction and introduces the commonly narrative strategies used in metafiction,such as intertextuality,parody,Chinese box structure and the recurring breaking and exposing of the textual frame.Chapter Three presents a detailed textual analysis of the embedded narrative strategy in Sweet Tooth.The Chinese-box narrative structure is used to construct three narrative levels in the novel.The transgression of narrative levels among the characters successfully subverts reader's cognition of authenticity.Chapter Four concentrates on the intertextuality in Sweet Tooth.In this novel,Ian Mc Ewan employs intertextual parallelism with literary works and figures,and intertextual parody of different genres including the autobiography,spy novel,and realistic novel.These designs help various literary works from distinct times juxtapose in a specific text.Thus,the certainty of the novel is deconstructed and the boundary between the fictional and reality is blurred.Chapter Five is a thematic interpretation of Sweet Tooth as a game.Mc Ewan implements this game with the help of various metafictional strategies.Thus,he successfully blurs the boundary between reality and fiction,discusses the subject of reader's participation and explores cooperation of readers and authors in this novel.Chapter Six,as the concluding part,restates the argument of the whole thesis.Under such intricate narrative manipulation of metafictional strategies,Mc Ewan succeeds in his game playing and expresses his view that “life is a fiction anyway”.