Free indirect discourse fused with omniscience can produce a closed self-justifying worldview

Evidence

Saturday is set on February 15, 2003, the day of huge antiwar marches in London and other cities across the world prior to the start of the attack on Iraq by U.S. and British forces. It contrasts the comfortable lifestyle of its central protagonist, distinguished neurosurgeon Henry Perowne, with the global upheaval caused by the war on terror and its prosecution, which has brought people onto the streets in unprecedented numbers. It also attempts to make connections between domestic familial relations and an invasive, brutal outside world that threatens them. The novel marries a modernist structure reminiscent of Woolf and Joyce, where all events take place in one day and include moments of epiphany for the central character, with a more conventional deployment of omniscience and free indirect discourse. In fact, the proximity of omniscience and the protagonist’s modes of thought is one cause of the strong sense of a closed, self-justifying perspective running through the novel. Although Perowne is clearly in some ways a flawed character, we are never given an alternative to the complacent view he offers. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 104

Categorization

• XREF: Directly transferable technique for reading Changez’s first-person narration in The Reluctant Fundamentalist, which similarly frames the counter-argument via its unreliable listener. — connects to: Unaffirmed assertions can express truths incommensurable with dominant discourse — Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason, 82
• SEED: Angle: contrast Perowne’s single-voiced free indirect discourse with the contested dialogue structure of Hamid’s novel to test which narrative form contests versus reinforces Islamophobia.