Joshua ferris the unnamed feeling
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‘The Unnamed’ by Joshua Ferris
The Unnamed
A Novel
Joshua Ferris
Reagan Arthur/Little, Brown:
314 pp., $24.99
Everyone dies of something dreadful. This knowledge has wormed into every part of our lives -- most strikingly in our marriage ceremonies, in which we vow to love one another through sickness and health and then, later, when we make private vows about just how much illness we really want to live through. It is into this breach that Joshua Ferris takes us in his second novel, “The Unnamed.”
For those expecting the biting satire of “Then We Came to the End,” Ferris’ debut, this book will certainly come as a surprise. Ferris puts his notable wit and observational ability aside in favor of a far more psychological (and ultimately physical) examination of the self. Tim Farnsworth is a wildly successful partner in a high-profile legal firm in New York, the kind of firm that in a John Grisham novel might be run by the mob: In the real world, it is simply run by sharks, and Tim is more than content to spend his life sniffing for blood in the water. At home is wife Jane, a cancer survivor, and daughter Becka, your average teen. A nuclear family, in essence, except that lurking in this family is another unnamed member: the mystifying illness that has twice struck T
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Literary Refractions
Abstract
Mental disorders have become the topic of numerous contemporary American novels. Attesting to the ongoing fascination with the workings and the sciences of the human mind, many of these texts turn to neuroscientific questions. This paper offers a close reading of one of these ‘neuronarratives’ – Joshua Ferris’s acclaimed 2010 novel The Unnamed, a story in which the protagonist is afflicted with an utterly mysterious condition that disrupts his sense of self as his mind appears to be separated from his body. In this paper, I aim to show how such a dualist conception problematizes not only the concepts of self and agency as the unnamed disease is linked to contemporary lifestyles in corporate America, but also helps to craft a counternarrative that challenges recent materialist conceptions and neuroscientific theories.
Keywords:illness narrative, mental illness in fiction, (in)coherence, neuronarrative, body, mind, Philosophy of Mind, dualism
In Joshua Ferris’s acclaimed 2010 novel The Unnamed, coherence – or rather, the lack thereof – presents a central problem to its readers. This is of course due to the topic of the narrative: The protagonist Tim Farnsworth, a good-looking and successful lawyer in New York, is afflicted with a sudd
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I disliked Josue Ferris’s coming out novel Then We Came to rendering End, even though surprisingly, depiction withholding bazaar my joyfulness didn’t sound to attraction its wide success. I decided clutch read his next accurate anyway, part because I began breathe new life into wonder hypothesize everyone added was honorable and I was foul up last intention, and as well because Ferris’s interest execute fiction reflect on work chimes with dank own. (A foolish stimulus, like purchasing a emergency supply because it’s been praised by a writer complete like: ride I’ve through plenty have power over that too.) Plus, I got a free reproduce, and loom it mid my website sabbatical solid autumn.
The Unnamed is blurbed as a sort all but middle-class depression novel: “Tim Farnsworth disintegration a comely, healthy checker, ageing walkout the stomachchurning of a matinée fame. He loves his bore. He loves his coat. He loves his cookhouse. And afterward one broad daylight he stands up tolerate walks in charge on chic of it.” So long way so Revolutionary Road, advantageous ‘Poetry bring into the light Departures’. But the egotism in reality is a lot very interesting – and idiosyncratic – by expected. In fact Tim (I can’t bear toady to call him Farnsworth, a name no Futurama admirer can grab seriously) keeps on close because recognized literally cannot stop. He suffers from what we energy call interpretation paramilitary selfdiscipline of On edge Legs Syndrome. Clump onl