AN UNRELIABLE AUTODIEGETIC MALE NARRATOR IN MARTIN AMIS’S LONDON FIELDS
AN UNRELIABLE AUTODIEGETIC MALE NARRATOR IN MARTIN AMIS’S LONDON FIELDS

Summary/Abstract: The aim of this paper is to interrogate the way unreliability affects the notion of gender in Martin Amis’s novel London Fields. In what follows, I would like to analyze the way in which Amis depicts gender through the voice of Samson Young, the narrator of the story who, I contend, is highly unreliable. His unreliability as a narrator combined with the fact that he is terminally ill (a literal interpretation of Roland Barthes’ The Death of the Author) helps deconstruct the patriarchal binary opposition male-female, replacing it with what Judith Butler calls “gender trouble” in a concoction which brings together metafiction, intertextuality and hyperreality. From Samson’s limited subjective and ultimately unreliable perspective, gender becomes a performative notion which Nicola Six, as the master-puppeteer in the primary diegesis, is able to manipulate. Her gender performances range from the patriarchal images of both good girl and bad girl to postmodern stances of fictionality and instability. By the same token, masculinity is constructed from television simulacra and outdated romanticism and it is always satirically hyperreal.

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