Analysis Of Saturday And Marc Forster's Stranger Than Fiction

In Ian McEwan’s Saturday and Marc Forster’s Stranger than Fiction, the protagonists ' lives are nothing extraordinary. Henry Perowne is a neurosurgeon and Harold Crick is a tax auditor. They exist in a world not too different than the audience and live relatively mundane lives. It is only when the synthetic aspect of each of their character is used that the narrative can really begin. This aspect often plays a background role to the mimetic and thematic parts of characters, which are more interesting to the audience as they help trigger catharsis within the narrative. However, it can be argued that it is only due to the synthetic that the narrative can exist with mimetic character motivations driving the storytelling process. In Stranger than Fiction, Harold begins to hear a voice. As a character who lived solely by the numbers as evidenced by “Every week day for twelve years, Harold would brush each of his 32 teeth 76 times” (Forster, Stranger than Fiction), this voice is quite understandably a shock. This voice narrates his

The shock of meeting Crick also leads to Eiffel changing her viewpoints. She had once only written stories where her main characters die at the end. However, it is only when Crick calls her that she has a change of heart and rewrites her story, as well as his. It is during this meeting that Crick becomes a synthetic character. By reaching out to Eiffel, he is able to change the narrative of his story. In McEwan’s Saturday, the main character also plays a synthetic role within the narrative. When Henry Perowne gets into a car crash with Baxter, it is his attitude “I am indeed sorry that you pulled out without looking” (McEwan 89) that ultimately leads to the final confrontation at the end of the novel. “Perowne understands that honour is to be satisfied by a thorough beating (McEwan 93). His mimetic aspects are clear within the context of the