SOURCE: Morrison, Jago. “Narration and Unease in Ian McEwan's Later Fiction.” Critique 42, no. 3 (spring 2001): 253-68.

In the following essay, Morrison examines aspects of time, gender identity, and historical memory in Black Dogs and Enduring Love, particularly as informed by Paul Ricoeur's Time and Narrative and the feminist theory of Julia Kristeva.

For a generation of well-established postmodernist writers in Britain, the exploration of narrative as the containment and control of temporal experience is of central importance. What makes Ian McEwan's writing especially worthy of attention is the way in which his experimentation with time and narrative is interlinked with the rethinking of gender identity. The early stories First Love, Last Rites (1975) and In Between the Sheets (1979) contained troubled and claustrophobic examinations of emergent masculinity. However, his novels from the 1980s onward contain an increasingly confident investment in gender as the central problematic through which the agency of the...