“I Hugged Myself”: First-Person Narration as an Agential Act in Octavia Butler’s “The Evening and the Morning and the Night”
“I Hugged Myself”: First-Person Narration as an Agential Act in Octavia Butler’s “The Evening and the Morning and the Night”
This chapter gives an introduction to the complex interrelation of agency and first-person narration in the works of Octavia Butler by way of her short story “The Evening and the Morning and the Night.” It is argued that the short story uses first-person narration to juxtapose the creation of self through language – for example, via changing we-versus-they constructions – with the self’s physical self-destruction. Not only does Butler’s text address the agential potential of the multidimensional category of voice, but its narrative perspective also bespeaks the deconstruction of the mind/body binary at the heart of the Enlightenment’s liberal humanist conception of the subject. Moreover, in choosing to construct the narrative as a creative utilization of African American literary tradition, the story creates a narrative intersectionality which serves as a locus of agency.
Keywords: African American literary tradition, agency, Butler, Octavia, “The Evening and the Morning and the Night”, first-person narration, I-narrative, liberal humanist subject, narrative intersectionality, subject of the Enlightenment
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