A Study Of The Temporal Predicament In Ian McEwan’s Post-1980 Novels

Ian McEwan(1948-),one of the famous contemporary British writers,focuses on the presentation of the British condition and keeps a careful eye on the time predicament in his eight post-1980 novels.McEwan’s concern for the predicaments between time,space,memory,history and future finds its resonance in the study of time in the fields of philosophy,hermeneutics and sociology.However,little research has been systematically carried out on the time predicament in McEwan’s novels.This thesis launches a critical study of McEwan’s post-1980 novels from the perspective of time predicament.Through an examination of time-related predicaments and resolutions,it aims at revealing McEwan’s concern about the contemporary human existence.The thesis is composed of five parts.The introduction begins with McEwan’s literature review,followed by the theoretical framework,keywords and an overview of each chapter.Time research focuses on the relationship between the present,the past and the future,embodies mainly the relationship between the present and other dimensions.The time predicament refers to the individuals’ negative experience in these dimensions.The relationship between time and space is the basic element for people to organize events.Time-space compression and time-space cycle are the main predicaments in space-time relationship.The search for happy time-space is one of the ways to get rid of the space-time predicament.The exploration of the relationship between time and memory is the basis of the time research.The description of memory is the key to the presentation of time.The division of individual and collective memory deepens the research on the exploration of time and memory.The memory maze and the memory cage are predicaments in the relationship between time and individual memory,while historical eradication and loss of historical identity between time and collective memory.These two memory-based predicaments are effectively alleviated by the Proust effect.The exploration of time and future is the ultimate purpose of time research.The overloaded news and doomsday predicament are predicaments in the exploration of the relationship between time and future.To explain the time predicament from the perspective of time,space,memory,history and future makes the research on time dimension diversified and solidified.The first chapter concentrates on the relation between time and space in The Child in Time and Sweet Tooth,as well as the time-space predicament of contemporary people.The protagonists in both novels are in the predicament of time-space compression and time-space cycle:The protagonist Stephen in The Child in Time loses his sense of boundaries of time and space in cycle time and synchronic space after losing his daughter.The female spy Serena in Sweet Tooth breaks through women’s time characteristic of the eternal return.Both of them keep anticipating happy time-space and go through a similar process of house changes when they encounter time-space difficulties.Through their different time-space experiences,McEwan analyzes the relationship between predicament and choice.The second chapter analyzes the relation between time and memory in Atonement and The Children Act,as well as the memory-based predicament of contemporary people.Although memory is mainly the memory of history,history is often presented through memory,different spatial and temporal choices form different individual memories.The protagonists in both novels are faced with the predicament of the memory maze and the memory cage:The memory fragments of the female writer Briony and the victim Robbie in Atonement force readers to construct the tragedy in the summer of 1935 by figuring time constantly in a maze of memory debris.The female judge Fiona and Adam in the blood transfusion case in The Children Act show signs of memory imbalance with varying degrees,as if they were prisoners living in a spiritual tomb.In the face of the shackles of memory,Robbie and Fiona choose to link sensory stimulation with memory and emotion,and perform memory aesthetics in the Proust effect triggered by olfactory,auditory and visual memories.McEwan explores the relationship between lies and reality,memory and the real world.The third chapter mainly discusses the relation between time and history in Black Dogs and On Chesil Beach,as well as the historical predicament of contemporary people.Individual memory differs with choices while collective memory generates conflicts due to different interests.The protagonists in both novels encounter inner conflicts and historical identity predicaments:Different from June and Jenny in Black Dogs who choose to prove the persistence of violence through oral narrative,Jeremy,after witnessing the Jewish people’s suffering and historical bystanders’ hands-off posture,shows a behavioral disorder with violence.The hard truth that the old British Empire ceased to exist in the 1960s makes Edward and Florence in On Chesil Beach into historic identity predicament.Jeremy and the Edward couple’s ideas on history and marriage are affected by paranoid thinking ways in the Cold-War era.McEwan presents the harmfulness of the Cold War mentality through Jeremy and Edward’s experience of historical predicaments,and reveals the repetition of history in time.The fourth chapter deals mainly with the relation between time and future in Saturday and Nutshell,as well as contemporary people’s future predicaments.Back tracking the past builds the foundation for the future.The heroes in these two novels meet with difficulties in the possible future:Henry Perowne in Saturday,lack of thinking ability,becomes a passive receiver of information,feeling overloaded when surrounded by ever-increasing news and information.The life of the fetal narrator in the uterus in is flooded with doomsday predictions.The different ways Perowne and the fetus respond to future crises reflect current people’s typical attitudes when they are mired in such difficulties.The current predicaments of Perowne and the fetus are also the future predicament of mankind.The discussion of them aims to clarify the relationship between information needs,inner thoughts and emotional autonomy,as well as the impact of allocation ways of time on people’s free lives.McEwan expresses his concern and anxiety to human’s actual predicament by presenting individual’s predicaments and resolutions in the dimensions of time,space,memory,history and future.He displays human behavior and spiritual world in different time predicaments,allowing readers to think about the possible way out of the predicament in the relationship between choice and fate.By observing the individual’s struggle and compromise in time from the perspective of the time predicament,we see McEwan’s pursuit and reflection on the way out of the predicament.