Ian McEwan’s Parable of Reading in Black Dogs

Abstract This paper aims to explore Ian McEwan’s vision of Europe in his 1992 novel Black Dogs. Published some three years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Black Dogs plunges its readers into a fictional experience that enhances their sense of an irrational fear and their apprehensions of evil forces haunting Europe’s past and present and bursting out in the shape of a pair of menacing creatures in London, France, Poland and Germany. Taking the reader back and forth in time and space in a narrative of mobility, McEwan projects a complex vision of Europe, where memory plays tricks and sheds light upon an essential, albeit inscrutable truth at the same time. Feeling that he belongs nowhere, in particular, Jeremy, the narrator-protagonist, probes into the past to find the key to the present, which overarches the future of the continent. In order to do so, his mind sweeps over moments and places, projecting pieces of a jigsaw puzzle which only the reading process can fit together. Looking into McEwan’s memory-oriented narrative strategies, the paper will focus on the emblematic role of the reader in a novel which is a parable of cultural, epistemological and literary reading.