Exploring Therapeutic Narratives and Narrative Agency in Twenty-First-Century English Fiction: Representations of Mental Illness and Recovery in Atonement, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, and Reasons to Stay Alive

Abstract

In this paper, the author investigates how therapeutic narratives and narrative agency are used to portray mental illness, recovery and empowerment within given twenty-first century English works: Atonement by Ian McEwan, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon, Reasons to Stay Alive by Matt Haig. The study background is based on the increased literary and cultural involvement in the mental health and narrative turn in modern fiction making storytelling a major method of making meaning and surviving psychologically. The initial aim that the study will conduct is to find out the role of narrative forms and voices in building therapeutic meanings and facilitating or limiting narrative agency. The research design used in the study is qualitative and interpretive, with close reading and comparative analysis of text as the primary data analyzing instruments. The theoretical framework merges the narrative theory, narrative agency theory, trauma theory and narrative therapy. The data will be a sample of narrative passages of mental illness, trauma, and recovery, where purposive sampling of the three main texts was used. According to the findings, therapeutic narratives operate in a different manner across texts: Atonement lays bare the ethical boundaries of narrative remedies, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time reconstructs the meaning of agency through neurodivergent cognition, and Reasons to Stay Alive introduces therapeutic narratives as a survival-focused and communal healing method. In general, the paper finds that therapeutic discursive narratives in English fiction of the twenty-first century are heterogeneous, morally ambiguous, and formative in the re-conceptualization of mental illness and recovery in a non-linear model of care.