Imagining the World and Its End: Ambivalent Globalization(s) in David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten

Abstract

"British author David Mitchell is undoubtedly among those contemporary writers who best capture the complexity of contemporary experience, in novels whose very structure mirrors the fabric of globalized human life. Yet his portrayal of our twenty-first-century world and its changing conditions is, more often than not, ambiguously pessimistic, demonstrating his unease as to the current excesses of neocapitalism. Such anxiety has led to significant choices in terms of themes, structure, genre, and language in most of his novels. This article analyzes some of the thematic and structural decisions in Mitchell’s first novel, Ghostwritten (1999), insofar as they participate in his ambivalent portrayal of the globe as at once inescapably doomed and yet possibly and conditionally salvageable.... the article attempts to uncover the uneasy sense of urgency and foreboding that saturates the novel, and emphasizes the extent to which cellular and circular apocalyptic narratives can help renew our sense of agency in a globalized world."