LIE, DECEPTION, PHILOSOPHY OF ETHICS AND THE NARRATIVE NETWORK OF THE COMFORTS OF SATURDAYS BY ALEXANDER MCCALL SMITH

Text topic: Lie in Art and Culture

Text author: Јелена Филиповић

From an angle of critical sociolinguistic analysis, a methodology of narrative networks is applied in order to argue for a relative interpretation of the narrative in a piece of detective fiction, The Comforts of Saturdays by Alexander McCall Smith. Some of the central narrative themes of the novel, lie and deception, forgiveness and penance, are interpreted within the theoretical and methodological framework which postulates that a text cannot be understood in isolation, in a social vacuum. The concept of narrative network, in which the text itself is but a single “knot” while the rest of the network is made up of a wide range of socio-historical factors, accompanying texts (interviews with the author, publisher advertisements, etc.), attitudes and interpretations of different types of reading audiences as well as the act of reading itself, allows us to better understand the relative and variable meanings of the plot and the moral directive force it proposes, opening up new spaces for a more complex, multi-layered understanding of the narrative fabric in its entirety.