Questioning Totality: Decentering and Fragmentation in McEwan's Enduring Love

Abstract

Enduring Love belongs to those works of literature which combine the typically postmodern elements that involves the themes of delusion and equivocal borders or limits of reality as well as the clash between science and reality or science and religion.The unreliability of any universal truth - or rather logic - is referred to repeatedly in the novel. The shifts from restricted to unrestricted narration represent an interesting dialectics and an example of a metanarrative approach. The use of pastiche is connected with the fragmentariness of the novel. It must be said that although the novel embodies many features of postmodern writing, such as the pastiche of genres, certain fragmentariness and mixing reality with fiction, the characters stand aside this characteristics as a result of the detailed psychological portraits provided by the author. The fragmentation in the narrator has been accompanied by the fragmentation in the narrative strategy in the novel.