“We order our lives with barely held stories”

Limitations of Self-Narrative in Michael Ondaaje’s Warlight

Abstract

In his latest novel, Warlight (2018), Michael Ondaatje returns to the theme of identity and explores the role of familial past and history which intersect in the life of his protagonist. In the article I argue that the novel highlights the limitations of the self-narrative it contains and problematizes the idea of a simple recreation of life as a source of identity and self-understanding, a belief which informs Paul Ricoeur’s conception of narrative identity. I show that the narrator’s recreations of his and his mother’s life stories display problems associated with self-narratives, frequently invoked by critics of Ricoeur’s conception, such as the narrator’s unconscious and defensive motives, which undermine both his story and the subjectivity it constructs. Additionally, the fact that the narrator’s biography is situated in the context of intergenerational legacies, long temporal scales, and the non-human environment allows us to view his life, his traits and qualities from those wider perspectives as shaped by both human and non-human factors. This insight further challenges the narrator’s mastery and the story’s causal structure. The article employs contemporary discourses which foreground the impact of deep time and of the nonhuman context on narrative and subjectivity to illuminate the significance of those extended perspectives in the novel. In its questioning of self-narrative as a source of self-understanding and identity, the novel shifts away from the anthropocentric focus on biographical time and human perspective to the recognition of our embeddedness in deep time and the non-human environment.