Historical Re-Enactment and Narrative Subjectivity in Elnathan John’s Born on a Tuesday

Abstract

Authors often adopt different viewpoints to x-ray and convey their messages in their artistic productions. Predominantly, some have engaged the first person point of view (internal focalisation) to subjectively present their tales, while some have used the third person point of view (external focalisation) to objectively bring home their messages. Thus, this study interrogates Elnathan John’s deployment of internal focalisation and narrative subjectivity in Born on a Tuesday. This paper is premised on the assumption that Born on a Tuesday is a subjective chronicle or re-enactment of the age-long religious and political violence as well as the emergence of the Boko Haram insurgence in the Nigerian landscape. Basically, discourses on literary narratives and especially the prose-fiction often focus merely on the interpretative or content analysis of such texts while paying little or no attention to its mode of rendition i.e. how such story gets told/narrated. Consequently, this essay deploys the poetics of narratology on the text under study to critically explore the tenor and texture and or structure of the novel as it borders on the perspective of the autodiegetic narrator who speaks and the narratee who perceives the story. Also, the study closely examines the shifts in time and place (itineration, flashback) to accentuate the correlations between narrativity and subjectivity in historical representations. This is because; narrative subjectivity manifests itself through the writer’s commitment to the portrayal of an identifiable truth which springs from his/her ideological, cultural, religious or political position.

Keywords: History, Narratology, Narrative subjectivity, Focalization, Insurgency.