Between Silence and Confession: Korede’s Double Bind in My Sister, the Serial Killer

This essay argues that the narrative core of Oyinkan Braithwaite’s My Sister, the Serial Killer is the paradoxical silence-confession split defining its narrator, Korede. Framing this dynamic through Gregory Bateson’s theory of the double bind, the analysis posits Korede’s condition—silent in the story world yet compulsively confessional to the reader—as the novel’s formal resolution to an inescapable communicative trap. The argument develops through four integrated aspects. First, it examines how this strategy constructs a complex, complicit reader relationship. Second, it analyzes its precise control over narrative suspense and rhythm. Third, it demonstrates how the dynamic externalizes the suppression and resistant self-empowerment of the female voice within Nigerian patriarchal and corrupt structures. Finally, it reveals that when all external communication fails, the tension internalizes and solidifies into a narrative and existential closed loop. The essay concludes that this evolution of the double bind, from psychological state to narrative strategy and finally to a form of existence, drives the plot, shapes the reading experience, and delivers the novel’s critique of systems that exhaust individual agency.