Quid est enim tempus? Temporality, causality, and narrative structure in selected West Indian self-portrait novels
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Abstract
In the twentieth century, a number of writers from the West Indian region rose to prominence, the majority of whom had African and/or Indian ancestry. And the most dominant method of representation that they chose for their novels was autobiographical fiction where the ‘I narrator’ started the narrative by telling about his or her childhood as they grew towards adolescence, and even adulthood. This paper, therefore, seeks to analyse the plot structure for the six selected novels published in the mid-1950s onwards. Of significance is the idea that all these novels have a similar type of narrative structure even if the points of view differ. To be exact, this paper examines causality and temporality to understand how characters and narrators are portrayed by the different authors in self-portrait novels. The novels under study are V. S. Naipaul’s Miguel Street and A House for Mr Biswas, George Lamming’s In the Castle of my Skin, Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea, Merle Hodge’s Crick Crack, Monkey and Marcia Douglas’ The Marvellous Equation of the Dread: A Novel in Bass Riddim. This paper is grounded in narrative theory and stylistics.
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