Selves and others : narrative technique, characterisation and cultural identity in A Passage to India and The English Patient
Jakob Lothe’s course “Narrative in Fiction and Film” underlines the vital importance of the whole context of the narrative, whenever telling a story on paper or on the screen. This thesis is a comparison of E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924), representing the European tradition of the 1920s,...
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Format: | Master Thesis |
Language: | English |
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2004
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Online Access: | http://hdl.handle.net/10852/25344 http://urn.nb.no/URN:NBN:no-9799 |
Summary: | Jakob Lothe’s course “Narrative in Fiction and Film” underlines the vital importance of the whole context of the narrative, whenever telling a story on paper or on the screen. This thesis is a comparison of E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924), representing the European tradition of the 1920s, and Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient (1992), representing the contemporary tradition of “the Other”. Their protagonists have a lot in common, but are treated differently by their narrators. In my thesis I discuss this issue and I try to explain the process the colonised go through in order to situate himself in relation to “the Other”. I found many parallels to my own search for “my selves” in the stories of Forster and Ondaatje. The analysis of the native protagonists’ search for their identities is therefore supplemented by comments from my experience in a Sami context. In addition to narrative theory a postcolonial perspective is used when approaching the novels and their adaptations to the screen |
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