Self, Death and Narration: Posthumous Narratives in Susan Taubes and David Foster Wallace

Abstract

The novel Divorcing (1969) by Susan Taubes and the short story “Good Old Neon” (2001) by David Foster Wallace share the presence of a dead narrator. The two dead narrators speak from a post-mortem position and engage in a self-reflexive storytelling attempting to convey their life-suffering and their individual struggle to define a self. This study shows that posthumous narration provides the two dead narrators with the possibility of restoring life and of constituting a self in death. The categories of posthumous narrative (Carrard 2021) and autothanatography (Bainbrigge 2005) are useful to illuminate the two works. While the first category sets the dead narrator in the narratological strand of unnatural narration, the second one provides a framework for wide-ranging reflections on death and the self, allowing for a link between narrative experimentation and the construction of the self. In Divorcing, the scattered organization of the novel’s sections mirrors the narrator’s self, which is defined in this work as multiple and fragmented. While fragmentation derives from the narrator’s unsufferable pains endured in life, multiplicity mirrors the several life-roles she had to inhabit. As for “Good Old Neon,” this thesis demonstrates that the narrator’s overnarrativization of his life turns out as deadly. Caracciolo’s theory of experientiality (2014) permits to prove that the reader is involved in the creation of the narrator’s self, which is constituted intersubjectively.