From Narration to Narratology in the Western and Postcolonial Literary Discourse: Flynn’s Gone Girl and Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children

Abstract

This research aims at identifying narrative structures and narratological concepts that link or separate the Western Narrative from the Postcolonial one. In narration, only the internal mechanisms have been dealt with whilst analysing. The core similarity between the two novels, Gone Girl - written by Gillian Flynn and Midnight's Children - written by Selman Rushdie - is that they ensue from oppression. Saleem, the unreliable narrator of Midnight‟s Children blends his individualistic narrative derived from his memory with a nationwide narrative of the birth of India, resulting in a historiographic metafictitious narrative. Amy Elliot and Nick Dunne, the two narrators of Gone Girl, express the female-male power struggle analogised on the dominance over the narrator‘s position. Having proved to be a metafictitious unreliable narrator, Diary Amy was also employed as a narratological tool that helped Amy Elliot secure her narrative dominance. However, this research aimed to draw a schematic narratological literary analysis and compare the Western and the Postcolonial discourses, having uncovered that they are far more similar than dissimilar.