The author/ narrator (this is a good example of autofiction) reveals herself indirectly through these meetings. Did the narrator fill in some details on her own? Is the narrator unreliable? Would it then mean that we can glean a collage of her personality from these submerged, tampered bits? However, the author reveals her design through Anne: that particular conversations is an illustration of what Faye is not they collectively outline her rather than informing her substance. It is difficult to believe that people would give so many telling details of themselves to a stranger. She hardly parts with any information of her own. However, “home” also represents a familiar pattern, which includes family and its subsets, the absence of which causes anxiety-a common malaise.įaye’s observations seem mostly objective. The sense of home in Outline seems to allude to the homecoming or the motivation to return experienced by Odysseus in Homer’s Odyssey. Faye’s other acquaintance, the neighbor, says that talking to his first wife feels like walking past his old house. While describing her reactions to her husband’s eating after their divorce, Anne says that she feels both Nostos (a sense of homecoming/ longing/ homesickness) and disgust. The conversation that the narrator has with a fellow writer Anne is the most telling and pellucid of all the ten. The narrator remarks that after her divorce, their home in the countryside had turned into a grave. Home or its sense is a recurring idea-the characters use it to represent relationships and family in the conversations. The primary function of Cusk’s book is not to tell a story but to delineate and outline the narrator’s opaqueness: a “reverse kind of exposition” or “anti-description”(Cusk 239).
Each conversation (there are ten of them in total) is a story in itself, some, stories within stories the narrator’s passivity miraculously elicits rich, detailed accounts of each person she encounters.
She initially feels like a nonentity, invisible and cipher-like, but we later realize that the book is indeed about her. The narrator Faye, a British writer visiting Greece to teach in a writing seminar, remains unnamed until we know her name late in the book. The story, set in Athens, is a series of conversations that the narrator has with friends, strangers, and students. Outline, a 2014 novel by Canadian born British writer Rachel Cusk, is the first book in The Outline trilogy.
0 kommentar(er)
