A Study Of Unnatural Narratives In Machines Like Me

As an outstanding “master of art” in contemporary British literature,Ian Mc Ewan(1948-)is adept at using various postmodern narrative strategies to describe the survival dilemma of modern people.In his novel Machines Like Me published in 2019,Mc Ewan explores the problems that humans face in the era of artificial intelligence.Breaking through traditional narrative conventions,the novel places futuristic science fiction elements in a historical past context and tells the story of the conflict and confrontation between a robot named Adam and the human couple Charlie and Miranda.So far,literary critics have mainly laid their focuses on the novel’s themes of technology ethics and human-machine relationships,whose studies lack in-depth exploration into the unique narrative strategies employed by Mc Ewan in Machines Like Me.Furthermore,there has been scant attention paid to the subversion of traditional narrative strategies in the novel.Therefore,under the guidance of the emerging field of unnatural narrative studies,this thesis makes a study of the unnatural narrative strategies in Machines Like Me by Mc Ewan,examines the defamiliarized effect they help to achieve,and explores the role these strategies play in the author’s reflections on human-machine relationship and human predicament.As the theoretical basis of this thesis,unnatural narrative theory is adopted for its aim to study unnaturalness in avant-garde postmodern narrative works.Unnatural narrative theorists Brian Richardson(2015)and Jan Alber(2011)claim that unnatural narrative refers to antimimetic texts that violate traditional realistic narratives,or scenes and events that are physically,logically or humanly impossible.Unnatural narrative theory provides a theoretical basis for exploring how Machines Like Me deviates from traditional narrative conventions and real-world cognitive frameworks.Based on a close reading of the novel,this thesis explores the unnatural narratives in Machines Like Me from four aspects: unnatural narrators,unnatural temporality,unnatural spaces,and unnatural emotions.First,the unnatural narrators in Machines Like Me can be found in the telepathic narrator,nonhuman narrator,extreme narrator,and the “we” narrator as a group.The novel employs unnatural narrators to dissolve the traditional authority of a singular narrator and achieves the effect of eliminating the boundary between the narrative subject and object.Secondly,the novel portrays an unnatural concept of time through the anachronic temporal order,the fusion of temporal realms,and the eternal temporal loop.It not only subverts the boundaries between history and the future but also shows the paradox between the advanced development of artificial intelligence and the lagging of civilization of human society.Furthermore,the novel employs counterfactual parallel space,fantastical cyberspace,and the transgression of storyworld boundaries as the representation of unnatural spaces,breaking the boundaries between reality and fiction and foreshadowing the challenges that human beings may face in the age of artificial intelligence.Moreover,the novel describes unnatural emotions,including humanly impossible emotion of the machine Adam’s love,psychologically impossible emotion of Charlie’s emotional distortion,and logically impossible emotion of the elimination of man-machine emotional opposition.The presentation of unnatural emotions reveals the humanization of machines and the mechanization of humans,blurring the boundaries between humans and machines and embodying the novel’s theme of human-machine community.Through the analysis of the unnatural narratives in Machines Like Me,this thesis finds that Mc Ewan breaks the boundaries between subject and object,history and future,reality and fiction,and humans and machines in the novel.On the one hand,the text presents the elimination of boundaries which is characteristic of Mc Ewan for his“boundary writings”.Mc Ewan uses unnatural narratives to reflect on technological progress and explore the state of human nature in the technological era.It not only reveals the crisis that artificial intelligence brings to human society,politics,and ethics,but also expresses the dilemma caused by human deficiencies to the harmonious coexistence of humans and machines.On the other hand,Mc Ewan uses unnatural narratives as the metaphor of boundary elimination in Machines Like Me to show how humans need to break through their inherent boundaries,abandon traditional human-machine opposition and anthropocentric thought,and establish a post-human ethics centered on general vitality in the coexistence of humans and machines.