From Gender Confrontation To Integration:Co-Narration And Co-Authorship In SWEET TOOTH

As a prolific writer,Ian Mc Ewan has been exploring various themes and techniques in fiction.Since Atonement,Mc Ewan has shifted his focus to individual identity and psychological predicament in modern society.At the same time,concerned with literary writing itself,he has become renowned for the sophisticated manipulation of writing techniques in conveying his reflections on literature.Published in 2012,Sweet Tooth is a story about the love relationship between Serena Frome,an attractive spy who likes reading novels,and Tom Haley,a talented writer.Though the book sells well,the number of relevant researches is relatively smaller compared with that of Mc Ewan‘s other works,partly because of its similarity to Atonement in narrative techniques.This thesis argues that unlike his earlier short stories which present the gender relationships in a distorted and abnormal way and explore the failure of mutual understanding between characters,Sweet Tooth is innovative in that by employing various narrative devices,Mc Ewan has managed to draw a metaphoric connection between gender binary and the dualism of writing and reading or author and reader by forming a community of his characters which symbolizes the harmonious relationship of genders as well as between author and reader.Through this metaphoric comparison,Mc Ewan presents his idealized version of binary relations where integration can be achieved through ethical practices in narrating activities and where integration can complement and promote each pole.In doing so,Mc Ewan solves the ethical dilemma concerning authorial atonement he puts forward in Atonement.Different from the common embedded narrative,the narration of Sweet Tooth can be divided into three layers with two reversals in narrators.The first layer is the narration of the heroine in the first person,which can be perceived through the very first reading.With the uncovering of the male protagonist‘s letter,the reader has entered the second layer with the male protagonist as the narrator,which forces the reader to reflect on the previous reading experience established with the female protagonists as the narrator.However,with the ending of the novel,it is suggested that the two protagonists are the co-narrators of Sweet Tooth and the readers enter the third layer of narration.The two reversals take place in the same chapter,which exerts a dramatic impact on readers‘ reading experience.Nevertheless,Mc Ewan has used various narrative techniques to foreshadow the second reversal throughout the whole novel.The structure of this thesis follows the readers‘ reading experience and uncovers the narrative devices in each layer of the narrative.The first chapter of this thesis corresponds to the first reversal,that is,the stereotypical portrayal of the heroine by a male chauvinist in the second layer of narrative and the confrontation between genders behind this delineation.The second chapter discusses the various narrative techniques used by the author to prepare for the second reversal,including reflexive stories and parodies,practices of narrative ethics,and Frye‘s structural movement.These narrative techniques help facilitate the gender integration of the two protagonists and make the revelation of co-narrators no longer untraceable.Chapter three analyses Mc Ewan‘s exploration of the author-reader interactions between the personalized figures of author and reader in the novel.The formation of the mutually understanding,balanced and checked relationship between the author and the reader,has gone through two stages: inter-subjectivity and the heightening of self-consciousness,which is completely in line with the reader-response theory.With their final collaboration manifested in the co-narration of Sweet Tooth,their relationship has become an embodiment of the idealized version of Mc Ewan‘s concept of author-reader dualism and gender dualism.The innovation of this thesis lies in its in-depth analysis of metaphorical comparison of gender integration and author-reader interactions in Sweet Tooth with multiple theoretical angles,which provides new perspectives for the appreciation and interpretation of Ian Mc Ewan‘s works as well as promotes the application of reader-response theory in literary criticism.