Browsing by Author "Ruokola, Suvi"

In Anna Burns’s Milkman (2018), the unnamed narrator, mostly referred to as “middle sister”, recounts her past experiences with her stalker “Milkman” in a close-minded community driven by gossip and paranoia. The novel is set in an unnamed Northern Irish town during the Troubles, and it explores the consequences of hearsay, harassment, and both gendered and political violence through a distinctive narrative voice. I approach the novel through narrative theory, more specifically cognitive narratology, by looking at how Alan Palmer’s theory of social minds can be applied to the novel. Palmer draws attention to the externalist perspective on fictional minds, focusing on the outer, public, social aspects of the whole mind. My aim is to use his theory to analyze the communal mind of Milkman by paying attention to the way that mind misuses shared thought, what causes this misuse, and how it affects individuals within that community. I also draw from Lisa Zunshine’s writing on theory of mind and metarepresentation, mostly seeking to look at how the community in Milkman uses theory of mind to attribute states of mind to individuals who do not fit in. Both Palmer and Zunshine are notable names in cognitive narratology, and their arguments are useful in analyzing how Milkman demonstrates the power that social minds can possess and abuse especially in times of political polarization and paranoia. To discuss the novel’s narration, I use literary scholar Susan Lanser’s approach to female writers and narrative voice. The field of literary studies is fairly divided on the concept of voice, and Lanser’s approach takes into account both the formal and political aspects of it while seeking to examine the different ways women writers have asserted their discursive authority. My focus is on Lanser’s definition of personal voice, by which she means autodiegetic first-person narrators like the narrator of Milkman. The unique linguistic features of the narrator’s voice reflect both her physical and mental world, and the retrospective form of her narration makes her voice come across as more reliable, transparent, and critical of her past.