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Experiencing Fictional Realities Experiencing Fictional Realities: An Account of Unreliable Narration, Immersion and Metafiction in Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho and Yann Martel’s Life of Pi Roos-Marijn ter Horst 10675760 Student-number: 10675760 Supervised by: Dr. Rudolph Glitz 30-06-2017 ter Horst 2 Contents: Introduction..............................................................................................................................4 Chapter 1: Framing and Entering: On the Border of Fictional Realities...........................9 1.1: Introduction........................................................................................................9 1.2: The Parergon and Paratextual Features..........................................................9 1.3: Titles and Covers: Crossing the Border into the Fictional Realm...............11 1.4: Influencing Interpretation: 'Author's Note' and Epigraph.........................12 1.5: Conclusion........................................................................................................15 Chapter 2: Fictional Worlds: Immersion, Polyvalence and Literature as Simulation....17 2.1: Introduction......................................................................................................17 2.2: The Fictional Worlds of Patrick Bateman and Pi Patel................................18 2.3: Open to Interpretation: How Polyvalence Enhances Immersion................20 2.4: Inference and Probability: Life of Pi's Unexpected Island...........................22 2.5: Inference and Probability: What Really Happened to Paul Owen?...........25 2.6: Literature as Simulation..................................................................................30 2.7: Conclusion........................................................................................................31 Chapter 3: How the Unreliable Narrator Reinforces the 'Reality Effect' of Fiction.......33 3.1: Introduction......................................................................................................33 3.2: Locating Unreliability: Deviating Patterns, Codes and Conventions in American Psycho.............................................................................................35 3.3: Locating Unreliability: Deviating Patterns, Codes and Conventions in Life Of Pi.................................................................................................................39 3.4: Conclusion........................................................................................................45 Chapter 4: Metafictionality: Where the Fictional World and the Real World Meet.......47 4.1: Introduction......................................................................................................47 ter Horst 3 4.2: Metafictional Revelations...............................................................................47 4.3: Allegorical Interpretations..............................................................................51 4.4: Conclusion........................................................................................................52 Conclusion...............................................................................................................................54 Cited Works............................................................................................................................57 ter Horst 4 Introduction In my very first year at the University of Amsterdam, in the first semester of the Bachelor Program Literary Studies, one of the works we were studying was Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho. We were only required to read the first few chapters, but when I pick up a novel I have a persistent urge to finish it - probably an extremely common character trait among us literary students and scholars. So I read on. What started out as an excessive, monotonous and even quite boring summary of what all the characters were wearing, eating and buying, became a breathtaking thriller with vivid accounts of horrible murders. The detailed descriptions of man's grooming products left me bored. The detailed descriptions of gruesome murders left me appalled and disgusted. So much so, that, on several occasions, I had to put the novel away every now and then, before my urge to continue reading was stronger than my aversion. Even when re-reading American Psycho for the purpose of this thesis, the almost physical reaction of disgust I had to certain scenes of the novel was still there. Another work of fiction that evoked a very strong emotional reaction in me was Yann Martels Life of Pi. I read this novel for the first time when I was about 15 years old, in Dutch. A couple of years later, I reread it in English. Every time, the tragic ending of Life of Pi nearly leaves me in tears; for 227 pages the reader joins a fantastic fairytale of a castaway boy and his unlikely companion in the form of a tiger in a boat, and that story is shattered in the novel's final pages. A big problem I encountered when writing my Bachelor's Thesis, is that, as my primary text for analysis, I chose a work of fiction that interested me theoretically, but, unlike the two novels I just mentioned, did not move me, bore me, disgust me or had any other emotional effect on me whatsoever, which made the whole ordeal somewhat exhaustive. A thesis takes up a large amount of time, and not being very emotionally invested in the primary text you spend all that time with is not very motivating or inspirational. So ter Horst 5 when the time came to think about what research I wanted to do for my Master's thesis, the first criteria, I had decided, was that I would choose a primary work of text that had really affected me emotionally. The endeavor of 'going through' the countless works of text in my mind that had emotionally moved me in the past, caused a question to dawn on me; in all these years of reading and studying literature, I had read amazing texts, but the list of novels and books that moved me emotionally – here I exclude the novels that moved me 'only' aesthetically – seemed to be quite arbitrary, and I started wondering: why? What made these particular texts more moving than others? From the perspective of a literary student these were not works that I considered different, better or worse in 'quality': it is certainly impossible to state objectively, for example, that Gabriel Garcia Marquez' Love in the Time of Cholera is a better novel than Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, but, personally, I have to say that the former had a much greater emotional effect on me than the latter. Although I quickly realized that measuring the amount of emotional effect that one particular novel might have on a reader is impossible – it is a very obvious matter of subjective and individual taste – I wondered to what extent the question of why novels can have such an emotional effect on their readers could be answered, and if that was the case, then how? It where these questions that jump-started my research, and it wasn't long before I remembered a text written by Umberto Eco, one that I also encountered in my first year of Literary Studies, in which he describes the sense of 'having really existed' that fictional characters can acquire through time and (emotional) impact. What fascinated me particularly, is that Eco referred to a study that showed that the more impact a fictional character had on its reader, the more people believed this character had actually, historically, existed. This, to me, showed that the impact a fictional character can have, is closely related to the extent in which we experience this character to be 'real', thus, I concluded, the matter of emotional engagement we feel when reading a novel, is closely related to our experience of reality when ter Horst 6 reading fiction. Of course we are generally aware, when reading fiction, that what we are reading is not 'true' or 'real' in contrast to how we experience our daily lives to be true. Still, there seem to be certain aspects of fiction that simulate a sense of reality, of a 'real' experience, and of real people, and although the novels that create this reality experience will still differ from reader to reader, it is possible to investigate which aspects, techniques and narrative strategies are most likely to create such a reality effect. It seemed only logical to me to thus undertake the enterprise of investigating fictional realities in a novel or novels that had great emotional effect on me. Life of Pi and American Psycho both belong to this category, but I came to these two novels because, while the emotions, feelings and reactions these novels evoke are arguably opposite, these books share remarkable similarities. These two novels not only create strong emotional reactions, they are also both works that play with the element of reality in fiction. Although the contents of these novels are quite different, both of these novels end with what I will call a metafictional revelation, in both cases a revelation that leaves the reader questioning what to believe. Life of Pi is a novel that is framed, presented and written almost as if it was an (auto)biographical artifact. American Psycho, on the other hand, is a novel that actively expresses its fictionality. As it happens, these two novels share one last, and to me very interesting and significant similarity; both of these stories are told from the perspective of an unreliable narrator. This, I will argue, is not a coincidence. In daily life we distinguish between truth and lies, between
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