| Summary: | Generic transformation of the castaway novel is made evident by the various ways in
which the narrative boundaries that separate fiction from reality and history, the past
from the present, and the rational from the irrational, are reconfigured in Umberto
Eco’s The Island of the Day Before (1994), J.M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986) and Yann
Martel’s Life of Pi (2002). The dissolution of boundaries reflects the dominant shift
that has occurred in the castaway novel from the 18th century literary context to the
present postmodern, postcolonial context. In this regard, the narrative utilizes various
narratological strategies, the most significant being intertextuality, metafiction,
historiographical metafiction, allegory, irony, and the carnivalesque. These
narratological strategies rewrite, revise, and recontextualize those generic conventions
that perpetuated the culture of masculinity and conquest that defines colonialism and
the traditional castaway novel epitomized by Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719).
From a postcolonial perspective, the castaway’s state of being reflects on the
condition of the colonized as well as the colonizer: his/her experience of displacement
is similar to colonized peoples’ separation from their cultural, spiritual and personal
identities; simultaneously, processes of appropriation, adaptation and control of space
resemble colonization, thereby revealing the constructed nature of colonial space. As
such, space is fundamental to individual orientation and social adaptation and
consequently, metaphorically and metonymically linked to identity.
In the selected postmodernist and postcolonial texts, the movement from the position
of castaway to colonist as originally manifested in Robinson Crusoe is therefore
reinterpreted and recontextualized. The postmodernist and postcolonial contexts
resist fixed and one-dimensional representations of identity, as well as the
appropriation and domination of space, that characterize shipwreck literature from
pre-colonial and colonial periods. Rationalist notions of history, reality and truth as
empirically definable concepts are also contested. The castaway identity is often
characterized by feelings of physical and spiritual displacement and estrangement that
can be paralleled to postmodernist themes of existential confusion and anxiety. === Thesis (PhD (English))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2013
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