The Hangman’s Game: Karen King-aribisala’s “Diary of Creation”
Karen King-Aribisala’s The Hangman’s Game (2007) is an intricate novel whose unnamed narrator, a young Guyanese scholar, lives in Nigeria and is writing a novel inspired by a slave revolt in Demerara (British Guyana) in 1823. The structure of King-Aribisala’s multi-layered novel is complex. The narr...
Shranjeno v:
| izdano v: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/ces, |
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| Glavni avtor: | |
| Format: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Jezik: | Anglais |
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Commonwealth Essays and Studies
2022
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| Online dostop: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Izvleček: | Karen King-Aribisala’s The Hangman’s Game (2007) is an intricate novel whose unnamed narrator, a young Guyanese scholar, lives in Nigeria and is writing a novel inspired by a slave revolt in Demerara (British Guyana) in 1823. The structure of King-Aribisala’s multi-layered novel is complex. The narrative constantly shuttles back and forth between present-day Nigeria, where the narrator lives, and nineteenth-century Guyana, that is, between the narrator’s “reality” and the fiction she is writing. The narrative of what happens in the narrator’s life is interwoven with passages from Three Blind Mice, her “work in progress,” printed in a different type to make the alternation immediately clear to the reader. The events which unfold in the narrator’s “real” life therefore provide the frame for the embedded novel, so that Three Blind Mice repeatedly appears in the main diegesis. Each narrative thread reverberates onto the other, creating an intricate network of (sometimes distorting) mirrors, suggesting an interconnectedness between past and present, reality and fiction, living and writing. This paper endeavours to explore this complex relationship and to demonstrate how the protean phenomenon of resurgence informs The Hangman’s Game. |
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