A Sense of No Ending, Part 1 Never Grow Up: Narrative Formlessness and Ideological Stasis in YA Fantastic Fiction

Narrative gives meaning to the passage of time by organizing it into a structured whole. The Western structure of temporality traditionally implied teleology, or what Frank Kermode called “a sense of ending.” For the last two thousand years, narratives of the future employed two generic templates: utopia and dystopia. Utopia, a literary depiction of an ideal society, and dystopia, its dark double, postulated a historical teleology in which the future was qualitatively different from the past and the present. In my essay I argue that we have entered the period of post-utopia, characterized by the sense of a continuous present, nostalgia, and narrative formlessness. Even those fictions that seem to represent a dystopian or apocalyptic transformation of the present are, in fact, articulations of the refusal to imagine the future. And this refusal is a symptom of a general paralysis of the historical imagination whose repercussions go beyond literature. The essay discusses the genre of young-adult (YA) fantasy and science fiction as highly symptomatic of the post-utopian trend in literature today. Though YA fantastic fiction is often described as dystopian, I argue that this is a misnomer and that such texts as Hunger Games, Maze Runner, The Giver, and other popular YA fantasies are, in fact, post-utopias and post-dystopias, characterized by specific narrative and thematic features that I describe as subversion of the bildungsroman, narrative circularity, and history as trauma.