Found in Narration: Nonhuman Voices in Jessica Grant’s Come, Thou Tortoise and Colin McAdam’s A Beautiful Truth

Abstract

This article delves into the problem of nonhuman subjectivity in two literary texts: Jessica Grant’s Come, Thou Tortoise with the first-person tortoise narration, and Colin McAdam’s A Beautiful Truth that employs the collective primate narrator. While nonhumans cannot actively participate in the act of creation of the text, their presence in the story, arranged by the author, conveys multiple meanings. Considerations of the narrative techniques are critical for negotiating the relevance of nonhuman actors. I argue that although each author finds different methods of giving voice to nonhumans and both ensure practical significance of animal particularity, nonhuman subjectivity should not be perceived as a fixed value of the presented literary texts.