Interpretation Of Saturday’s Hidden Text

Ian McEwan is an outstanding writer of serious contemporary literature in United Kingdom, who has superb narrative techniques as well as social, politics, history and culture and many other areas of deep concern. Unreliable narration as a core concept of the field of narrative, it gains more and more attention from postmodern literature, and be referenced and used by novelists, critics and theorists consciously. In McEwan’s novels, we can find many characteristic of unreliable narration by representatives, as his collection of short stories First Love, Last Rites(1975), Novella The Cement Garden(1978) and Atonement(2001) and so on. Saturday(2005) is considered by many critics as, continuing the superb narrative skills to construct the works meaning of texts and have established the multiplex data exchanges with readers. In this paper, I’ll use rhetoric method of narratology to McEwan’s Saturday, from unreliable narrative perspective, try to start from three aspects that alienation narratives, contractual narrative and character to explore the strategy described in the text construction as well as ethical and aesthetic effects, the first chapter mainly talked about the differences between the text of Saturday as a third person novel and the first person novel,especially the type of distance between reader of author and narrator. Secondly, there are three subtypes in Phelan’s theory: Sincere but misguided self-deprecating, part of the approach and by positive comparison to the normal paradigm contract, which are used in the study on the Saturday unreliable narrative text. Finally, it’s the most important to analysis the effect of unreliable narration by figural point of view, to lurking deep topics below the surface text.