The Mannequin as an Active Agent: Decentered Subjectivity in Ian McEwan's Short Story “Dead as They Come”

While Dead as They Come, written by Ian McEwan, has been analyzed in different ways, the agency of the nonhuman, that is, the Mannequin, hasn't received any critical attention. The purpose lying at the heart of this study is to examine the short story through the perspective of a nonhuman, the Mannequin portrayed in the short story, thus elucidating the vitality, subjectivity, and agency of an object rather than the subject of the short story, to wit, the protagonist. To that end, the foregoing research will have recourse to the theoretical framework of Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO), established by such philosophers as Graham Harman, Timothy Morton, Ian Bogost, Jane Bennett, Levis Bryant, etc. In shifting the focus on the none-and-more-than-human, thus decentering the subject, OOO avers that objects are endowed with the agency, reality, and world of their own, independent of the subjects. In this study, it's concluded that Mannequin, in this short story, acts as an active agent rather than a passive one, manipulating and exercising a great deal of influence over the protagonist of the short story, that is the subject, hence deconstructing the traditional subject/object binary opposition that has not only denied agency to the objects, regarding them as passive entities at the service of humans but has also created a big gap that has prohibited a symbiotic interaction between the realms of the subject and object.

کلیدواژه ها:

OOO ، agency ، nonhuman ، mannequin ، decentered subject ، Ian McEwan