Consciousness and Ian McEwan's Saturday: “What Henry Knows”

摘要

An essay is presented on the representation of consciousness in Ian McEwan's novel Saturday. It considers the ways by which McEwan explores the complexities of mental processing through the combined effects of characterisation, focalisation and conceptual metaphors. It offers an interdisciplinary analysis, using ideas from the cognitive sciences to view Saturday as a meta-text, inviting us to reflect upon the complementary roles of science and the arts in our efforts to understand the mind.