An Unnatural Narrative In Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me

Ian Mc Ewan,one of the most influential writers in contemporary Britain,is known for his delicate narrative skills and incisive writing style.Machines Like Me,which is a new fiction of him,takes artificial intelligence as the theme and tells the failure of machine Adam’s engagement into human life by unique writing strategies.Ian Mc Ewan deconstructs narrative elements in the text and its distinctive narrative techniques have been regarded as the key to interpret this fiction.This thesis intends to explore unnatural factors from the perspective of unnatural narratology and analyse its artist effect and ethical implications.The thesis consists of six chapters.The first chapter introduces Ian Mc Ewan and his works,combs literature review,clarifies research questions and identifies the research structure.The second chapter untangles the origination and development of unnatural narratology,presents the cognitive parameters,namely,unnatural time,unnatural narrator and unnatural figures.The main body of this dissertation is composed of the next three chapters.The third chapter applies axioms of time summarized by Jan Alber to analyse the time in the text,which deconstructs the real-world knowledge of time.Specifically,unreal and fictional social events and art phenomena create an impossible parallel temporality,which breaks the singleness of time;The writer disrupts the chronological sequence in the text,so as to break the directionality of time.The fourth chapter uses the arguments of narrator to find that the narrator Charlie transcends the cognition scope of the real world and possesses unnaturalness.Charlie’s narrative is self-contradictory,which violates the logical principles of non-contradiction.Besides,the narrator can acquire and describe what happened out of sight,which is humanly and physically impossible.The fifth chapter utilizes Jan Alber’s unnatural figure to reveal its human and physical impossibility.Robot Adam is found to develop a mind of its own and have unnatural emotions,while Charlie has surrealist perceptual ability occasionally.The sixth chapter explores artistic effects and the implication of machine-human ethics.The storyworld can be recognized as a preview of future,promoting humans reconsider the topic of facing the artificial intelligence era.