Fragmented Syntax and the Re-building of Self in Eimear McBride's A Girl is a Half-formed Thing

ULEAD 2024 Annual Congress, Ankara, Türkiye, 27 - 28 Eylül 2024, ss.376-380, (Tam Metin Bildiri)

Yayın Türü: Bildiri / Tam Metin Bildiri
Basıldığı Şehir: Ankara
Basıldığı Ülke: Türkiye
Sayfa Sayıları: ss.376-380
Ankara Hacı Bayram Veli Üniversitesi Adresli: Evet

Özet

Eimear McBride’s debut novel A Girl is a Half-formed Thing (2013) is an inspiringly
fresh return to Modernist narrative experimentation in seeking to mirror a
character’s psychological fragmentation and her subsequent attempts at self-
reconstruction. This paper explores how McBride employs fragmented syntax,
disjointed sentence structures, and “stream-of-being” techniques to convey a
fractured inner world and the complexities of trauma. By disrupting conventional
grammatical and narrative forms, McBride seeks to align her readers’ experience
with her protagonist’s fractured psyche in order finally to create a sincere, earnest
and immersive engagement with trauma and resilience. The analysis focuses on how
this syntactical fragmentation serves not only as a critique of traditional notions of
narrative and language as transparent mediums for human experience and
consciousness but also as an enactment of the character’s struggle to articulate her
experience. In this sense, the paper examines how McBride’s modernist-influenced
style represents the protagonist’s attempts to reconstruct her sense of self. In doing
so, A Girl is a Half-formed Thing redefines the possibilities of literary form to offer a
transformative reading experience of a blended Modernist and Metamodernist kind.