The ex-centrics in the novel are generally found to be marginalised due to spy fiction-related issues of invisibility, silence, and anonymity. Section 3.3 highlights that ex-centrics play a major role in Warlight. Section 3.2 indicates how Ondaatje’s novel blurs the traditional distinction between history and art in several ways. Section 3.1 shows that Warlight challenges history because of the way it exposes the unreliability and subjectivity of principles key to the creation of history, such as a reliance on memory, textuality, and recording. Postcolonial issues that come to the fore in the novel through these aspects of historiographic metafiction are discussed throughout these sections. What follows is a four-part close reading of Warlight, each revolving around one of the major characteristics of historiographic metafiction. Additionally, the theoretical section also focuses on the compatibility of a postmodern approach to historical fiction and postcolonial concerns. In order to answer this question, Hutcheon’s notion of historiographic metafiction is first outlined by means of focusing on the four main characteristics of the postmodern concept. This thesis focuses on the question of to what extent Michael Ondaatje uses historiographic metafiction to (re)write history from a postcolonial perspective in his novel Warlight (2018). MA Thesis, University of Eastern Finland 2020.
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