“Unreliable Narrators and Chaotic Structure: The Art of Misremembering in I’m Thinking of Ending Things.” Carina Stopenski, Carnegie Mellon University.
In Charlie Kaufman’s film I’m Thinking of Ending Things, based on Iain Reid’s novel by the same name, memory and reality blur with fantasy. While we are led to believe that our protagonist is the nameless young woman whose inner monologue we are greeted with at the start of the film, the true plot of the film is based on the constructed memories of her boyfriend Jake. Over the course of the film, it becomes apparent that everything that had happened thus far, including the existence of the nameless young woman, is a figment of Jake’s imagination. Not only is there the disruption of narrative through erratic scene cuts, rapid aging and de-aging of characters, and incongruous characterization, but the entire film portrays the memory of a disturbed, mentally ill man as a simulacrum of normalcy. The narrative of the couple is spliced with scenes of an elderly janitor, revealed to be the actuality of Jake’s life, not the constructed reality that has appeared throughout the film. The film’s framing of “ending things,” at the start of the film painted as the end of a relationship and at its end a nod to suicide, creates a circular nightmare for Jake, and it begs the analysis of whether or not the constructed reality of the mentally ill is a valid form of memory. The experimental nature of the film shows characters’ misremembering of events as a means of plot propulsion, with the diminishing of Jake’s psyche only reaching its climax as he continues to endure the chaos of the fictitious life he has created in his head crumbling around him. This paper will explore the way that I’m Thinking of Ending Things utilizes memory, reality, and fantasy to demonstrate the psychosis of constructed reality.
Carina Stopenski (they/them) is an information sciences professional, creative writer, and educator whose research interests center around animation, horror media, transfeminism, and video game studies. Carina received their BFA in creative writing from Chatham University in 2018, where they also obtained a gender studies minor. Following completion of their BFA, they went on to receive their MSLS in library science with a reference services certificate from Clarion University of Pennsylvania. Currently, they work as an access services librarian and a freelance humanities educator on an online homeschooling platform, and are pursuing an MA in Literary and Cultural Studies at Carnegie Mellon University. They also serve as a peer reviewer for The Journal of Anime and Manga Studies. Some of Carina’s educational passions include radical information access, ecofeminism, anime studies, narrative analysis, and transhumanism.
“Memory and Power: Unreliable Narrator in Ma Jian’s Beijing Coma and Mo Yan’s The Republic of Wine.” Dania Shaikh, St. Xavier’s College, Gujarat University.
The 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and their suppression mark a watershed moment in contemporary history due to the efficiency of the state-enforced silencing that followed. Ma Jian’s Beijing Coma and Mo Yan’s The Republic of Wine were conceived in response to such official erasures and control. The two novels differ in their subject matter; however, they place the unreliable narrator at the centre in order to critique the larger political structure.
Beijing Coma is narrated by a singular first-person narrator, marked by temporal and casual disruptions, contradictions in speech, and foreshadowing. The narrative takes place inside the mind of Dai Wei where the readers are aware of his compromised consciousness given his comatose condition indicated by memory lapses and lack of bodily control. His position as a victim paired with non-linear narration infers his view where every event is presented as leading up to the massacre. On the other hand, The Republic of Wine has two narrators: “Mo Yan” and Li Yidou; the events unfold in a distorted logical sequence bifurcated into three strands where the narrators are heterodiegetic as well as homodiegetic. The triple narrative structure with its sequential and linguistic disruptions highlights the ambiguity between narrators as well narrative events.
This paper explores how narrative ambiguities inform cultural and individual memory. The interactions between memory with past and present events invariably inform the course of the future. In popular discourses, the glitz of industrial cities has camouflaged the structural violence that underlies it. As against this, unreliable narrators explore how the political elite has ravished individual mentality and led to a breakdown of individual psyche. Such disjointed subjectivity emerges as the tool to critique public amnesia, political discourses and the relationship between the individual and the state, addressing questions of legitimacy and individuality as paramount to society.
Dania Shaikh is a graduate student at St. Xavier’s College, Gujarat University, India. Their research interests include memory studies, trauma studies and queer studies.
