Abstract
This article is an attempt at breaking through the existing pattern of criticism and diverting our attention to the covert narrative dynamic behind the plot development of Ian McEwan’s recent fiction, Machines Like Me, so as to reveal the ironies and paradoxes underlying the text. Firstly, the love feelings of Charlie and the humanoid Adam towards the same woman, named Miranda, are brought into a comparative observation, in order to uncover the hidden drives behind their respective confessions of love, which subverts the overt narrative progression. Secondly, the deeply-felt tension between the individual (the personal) and the society (the political) is analyzed and discussed; and thirdly, the human individual’s socialization and the machine’s individualization are contrasted. Finally, the fiction is studied further in relation to McEwan’s short story “Düssel…,” with the aim of evaluating the ultimate importance of individual feeling compared with social truth-values.
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Notes
Emotional intelligence, defined as “the ability to monitor one’s own and other’s emotions, to discriminate among them, and to use the information to guide one’s thinking and actions” (p. 5). For details, refer to Emotional intelligence: Key readings on the Mayer and Salovey model.
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ZHOU, M., WU, W. Negotiation between social structure and personal feelings—An inquiry into the covert progressions in Ian McEwan’s Machines like me. Neohelicon 49, 533–549 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-022-00655-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-022-00655-9