Yearning for the Plot Enclosure in Ian McEwan’s Black Dogs

The British Empire’s disintegration drove its many residents into an enclosure of illusions of sovereignty. As McEwan’s works emerged amid such developments, his characters respond to the rising disintegration either by imposing control patterns on others or by taking the needy into protection. The novel Black Dogs focuses on the protagonist-narrator Jeremy, who is determined to redeem his adoptive parents’ ruined familial intimacy. However, his considerate attitude to them is gradually disclosed by the author as an attempt to solidify his unbelonging self. His generous opening to them by means of a mobile plot that meanders through European history gradually turns into a self-protective consolidation. Indicatively, his plot’s sleepwalking through historical perils recalls the ancient Greek love romances, whose readers were equally frightened by the whims of an unchained history. Yet unlike them, who used to attach themselves to the ups and downs of the imperiled lovers, Jeremy’s addressees are attracted by his wandering plot that occupies the individual and collective territories of others. In a final twist, the author even surpasses this self-consolidating expansion into foreign territories by his clandestine plotting of an intertextual space and thus reveals the appropriative, conspirational character of his pact with the readers. A complicit alliance with them comes into being, which he keeps controlling and steering.