Mediating the Subjective Experience of a Troubled and Troubling World: Storytelling in Dystopian Novels by Margaret Atwood and Johanna Sinisalo
Mediating the Subjective Experience of a Troubled and Troubling World: Storytelling in Dystopian Novels by Margaret Atwood and Johanna Sinisalo

Summary/Abstract: The paper seeks to examine different forms and functions of storytelling in two selected dystopian novels, namely Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) and Johanna Sinisalo’s The Core of the Sun (2016). Approaching the novels through the lens of dystopian fiction, the comparative analysis focuses on the use of language and storytelling as a form of resistance against oppression. Embedded in the very title of Margaret Atwood’s most famous novel, the motif of storytelling proves to be one of the central building stones of her narrative. Offred’s fragmentary, and often unreliable, tale not only provides a piercing portrait of a crude dystopian reality, it also symbolically challenges and undermines the authority of Gilead’s regime. Sinisalo’s Finnish weird novel also features a troubled young woman trapped in a dystopian system of government. She challenges and subverts the regime of the Eusistocratic Republic of Finland not only symbolically but also factually by secretly using and dealing the forbidden capsaicin as well as by living in disguise. Similarly to Atwood’s literary work, the narrative form of Sinisalo’s novel, largely defined by the protagonist’s subjective and fragmentary insights, provides a puzzle-like mediation of a firsthand experience of a troubled and troubling world.

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