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Disillusion in Ian McEwan's 21st century Novels
Zemanová, Tereza ; Beran, Zdeněk (advisor) ; Kolinská, Klára (referee)
(in English): The focus of this diploma thesis is disillusion in the works of the contemporary novelist Ian McEwan, particularly in his twenty-first century novels. The thesis analyses the disillusionment of the reader based on McEwan's work with traditional narratives and the reader's expectations, which is achieved through the employment of the unreliable narrator in Atonement (2001) and Sweet Tooth (2012), depiction of self-deception in Saturday (2005) and Solar (2010), and the misunderstanding on the interpersonal and intrapersonal level in On Chesil Beach (2007) and The Children Act (2014). The analysis uses the method of close reading and critical evaluation through the hermeneutic process in combination with Iser's theory about the reader, Foucault's definition of discourse and some generally accepted ideas based on psychology. The analysis reveals that Ian McEwan uses disillusion in his novels as a device through which he tries to encourage the reader to critically evaluate the reader's preconceptions about the world, the conventional narratives, and the roles the reader ascribes to him/herself and to the society around him/herself. By allowing the reader to build his/her expectations of the story's denouement and then crushing them, McEwan points out the reader's routine regarding a given...
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