Abstract Paul Lynch's 2023 dystopic novel, Prophet Song, depicts a fictional totalitarian crisis in contemporary Ireland. The narrative, told entirely in free indirect discourse, follows the mind of its protagonist, Eilish, as she tries to do the right thing for her diminishing family in an increasingly oppressive, claustrophobic, and dangerous state of emergency. Exploring ways of knowing in the novel, this essay examines the interplay between its narrative mode (free indirect discourse) and its genre (dystopia). While dystopian fiction is an important way for us to reflect on our realities, the genre also posits a tyrannical hold on the way we know our world, faulting us for not accepting what the narrative shows is inevitable. By contrast, free indirect discourse often—and especially in Prophet Song—depicts knowing as realizing, as an ostensibly more complex, perhaps open-ended process, than the doom offered by dystopia. However, by its exclusive focus on Eilish's individual consciousness the narrative also faults her for her failure to understand her situation. This sense of failure is heightened by the novel's dystopic tendency to eschew political solutions, especially those that demand collective, rather than individual, action and imagination. The epistemology of literary forms thus offers a heuristic to address urgent political questions of knowledge, belief, and truth in the novel, and in the world around us.
Ayelet Ben-Yishai (Sat,) studied this question.