Metafictional Twist Endings in Ian McEwan‘s Atonement and Sweet Tooth
Metafictional Twist Endings in Ian McEwan‘s Atonement and Sweet Tooth

Summary/Abstract: The metatextual narrative techniques in Ian McEwan‘s novels, Atonement (2001) and Sweet Tooth (2012), raise questions about the influence that literature can exert on life by blurring the previous boundaries between reality and fiction and by creating metafictional twists. In Atonement, McEwan employs the rhetorical device of the coda and, by turning into metafiction what was previously believed to constitute the diegetic narrative, shatters the illusion created by the fictional world of the main narrative, forcing the readers to consider the text from a novel perspective and highlighting the inadequacy of their perceptions. The concluding twist in Sweet Tooth is also meant to make the readers revise and alter their understanding of what they have been reading, a complete appreciation of the narrative technique being thus retrospective. The two novels radically reconsider the roles of the author, narrator, character, and reader with a view to addressing moral questions, as I aim to point out in my close reading of the two novels.

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