Alasdair Gray: Poor Things
Paratext:
Blurbs, flap-texts: ‘fictional’
Cover(s): Jacket, hard-cover
Epigraphs, motto: Extra-diegetic, intra-diegetic
Dedication(s): Extra/intra-diegetic
Illustrations: Gray as Strang, Gray’s Anatomy, Gray as editor,
Gray as ‘Gray’
Foreword, introduction by a ‘fictional’ Gray
Title(s): Book, chapters
Table(s) of contents, Lists
Letters, facsimiles
Post-script
Notes, commentary
Narration:
Multiple narrators:
‘Gray’, Archie, Wedderburn (in letter), Bella (in letter), Victoria
(in postscript letter), Gray as editor
Counter-‘narrators’: Baxter as commentator and censor of letters,
Victoria
Radical dialogism
Heteroglossia: found material etc.
Symmetrical structures and doubles
Characters:
Bella/(Bell)/Victoria
Archie/McCandless/Candle
Baxter/God
Themes:
Medicine/disease/morality
History/politics/Scotland – the Empire/class/(‘loving’)economy
Love/sex/marriage/mores
Identity/‘making’
Symbols:
‘Poor’
‘things’
Anatomy (destiny or not): organs of all sorts
Emblems of various kinds
Texts/intertexts/literature
Flopsy & Mopsy