“Punish with Impunity”: The Unreliable Narration in “My Purple Scented Novel”

As the only short story of Ian McEwan in the past 40 years, “My Purple Scented Novel” (2016) deals with the subject of friend betrayal and plagiarism in literary creation. Since this short story is narrated in the first-person narrative of the protagonist Parker Sparrow and in the form of confession deprived of the sense of repentance and shamefulness, the “performativity” of the narration is worthy of study. By adopting the narratological theories of James Phelan and Ansgar F. Nünning, we intend to brand Sparrow as an unreliable narrator, for he has diverged from the value and judgment of the implied author and the massed reader as well to evoke a discussion on ethics. His unreliability is to be gauged in the tripartite structure between textual phenomena, authorial agency and reader response. In this vein, this story underlines the tension created by McEwan and explains how Sparrow, though seeming to have escaped from the punishment of justice, suffers the ethical accusation as a kind of punishment with impunity.